FastPage vs Linktree for cafes and restaurants

You've seen the pattern. A cafe's Instagram bio: "📍 Collingwood · 📞 phone · 🍳 menu in stories · 🔗 linktree". You tap the Linktree. You see five buttons: MENU. HOURS. BOOK. INSTAGRAM. CALL. You tap "MENU". It opens a Google Drive PDF, badly. You tap back. You tap "HOURS". It opens another page. You tap back. You forget what you were doing.

Linktree was built to be one link in a bio. For a venue, you're trying to use a bio-link tool as a website. That's the gap.

What Linktree's actually good at

For a person — an influencer, a writer, a freelancer — Linktree is genuinely useful. You're a person, not a place. You don't have hours or an address. You have a podcast, a newsletter, a Substack, a recent album. Linktree lets you push customers between those without making a website. That's the job and it does it well.

Linktree's also genuinely free. You can have a working page in five minutes with no card on file. FastPage charges a monthly subscription — there's no perpetually-free tier. If you're brand-new and broke, that's a real difference.

Where it falls down for a venue

A cafe is a place. People Google "Lavanda Cafe Collingwood hours" and Google needs a webpage to surface, with details about your business, that says "open today 7am to 3pm, 4.8 stars, here's the map". Linktree pages can't provide that — they're thin redirect surfaces, and Google ranks them weakly.

Three concrete moments where Linktree costs you a customer:

1. A customer Googles your venue at 11am on a Sunday. Your Linktree shows up (maybe), but it doesn't say "open now". The page below — the one with the address, the hours, and a rating — is your competitor.
2. A friend texts a link to your Linktree in a group chat. iMessage tries to unfurl it. It's a Linktree-branded card, not your venue. Half the readers don't tap.
3. A customer wants to book. Your Linktree opens a "Book a table" button which opens OpenTable in another tab. That's one extra hop and on patchy 4G half of them give up.

A real website collapses these. Menu, hours, address, booking link — all on one indexed page that loads fast.

When each is right

Linktree is right when you're an individual, not a venue — or when you have a Linktree habit already and you don't mind your customers seeing Linktree branding when they share you.

FastPage is right when customers Google your business name and you want a real result, not a redirect page.

Try FastPage free for 14 days. Keep your Linktree if you want. Most cafes do. The point isn't to replace your bio link — it's to have a real website behind it.