Craft beverage websites: age gates, stockist finders and the pages that actually sell

Drinks brands get a website problem nobody else gets. You are selling something regulated, to an age-restricted audience, often through a distribution chain you don't control, in jurisdictions with rules that contradict each other — and the whole category is judged on how the thing looks.

So the sites tend to be beautiful and structurally broken. Gorgeous typography, a full-screen bottle, an age gate that hides everything from search, and a stockist page last updated two years ago.

Here's what actually matters when you build one, in the order it matters.

First: decide whether you're selling online at all

The single biggest architectural decision, and many brands never make it consciously.

Shipping alcohol direct to consumers is heavily regulated and the rules vary enormously — by country, by state or province, sometimes by municipality. Licensing, carrier rules, taxes, volume limits and permitted destinations all differ, and they change. This is a question for your counsel and your distributor, not for your web agency, and it should be answered before the site is designed — because it determines whether you're building a shop or a shop window.

Three viable models, and the choice interacts with which platform you build on:

The failure to avoid is building a full store and then discovering you can ship to three of your eight markets — you've paid for commerce infrastructure that mostly renders a "not available in your region" message, which is a worse experience than a good stockist list.

Age gates: the one that quietly costs you

Almost every drinks site needs an age check. How you implement it determines whether your content is findable.

The bad pattern, still the most common: a separate interstitial page at a different URL that everyone hits first. Every visitor and every crawler lands on a page containing nothing but a date-of-birth field. Your actual content sits behind it. Shared links land on the gate rather than the page someone meant to share.

The good pattern: render the real page, and overlay the age check on top of it. The content exists in the document, the URL is the real URL, a shared link goes where it was meant to, and the answer is remembered so it isn't asked on every visit.

Practical guidance we'd give any drinks brand:

• Never redirect to a separate gate URL. Overlay on the requested page.
• Remember the answer for a reasonable period, and don't re-ask on every page.
• Don't block the first paint on a script. If the overlay is injected by JavaScript after everything else loads, visitors watch a blank screen, and it's the largest element on the page — which is exactly what page-speed metrics measure.
• Make it keyboard accessible and screen-reader sane. It's the first thing every visitor touches.
• Check what your markets require. Some expect a date of birth, some a simple confirmation. This varies and it's worth asking rather than copying a competitor.
• Consider what you show behind it. The overlay is a courtesy layer, not a security control — treat the page as public, because it is.

What the site is for when you can't sell directly

If you're a shop window, the temptation is to build a beautiful brand site and stop. That leaves most of the value on the table, because four of the five jobs go unbuilt.

The stockist finder is the conversion event. For a brand sold through retail, "where can I buy this near me" is the highest-intent action on the whole site — the equivalent of an add-to-cart. It deserves the same care: searchable, filterable by region, accurate, and maintained. Most are a static list of shop names last updated when the site launched, which converts intent into frustration.

Two rules that make the difference: give it a real URL so it can rank and be linked, and give someone ownership of keeping it current, because a wrong stockist is worse than none.

The trade section is the second-highest-value page and almost nobody builds it. Buyers, distributors and venue managers are looking for things a consumer never wants: case configurations, unit sizes, ABV, allergens, barcodes, shelf life, sell sheets, high-resolution imagery, and who to contact. Put it behind a simple form or leave it open, but build it — a distributor who can't find your specs will ask a competitor's rep who has a PDF ready.

Feed the channel. Your retailers, delivery apps and marketplaces will publish your product with whatever assets they can find. Give them a downloadable pack — good product photography on white, lifestyle shots, approved copy, logos — and your brand looks consistent everywhere it appears. Skip it, and someone will crop a screenshot.

The technical bits specific to drinks

Product photography is your page weight. Drinks sites are image-led by nature, so this is where speed goes. Modern formats, correct dimensions, lazy-load everything below the fold, and never ship a 4000px hero to a phone. This is one case where the images genuinely are the point — so the fix is optimising them properly, not having fewer.

Ingredient and allergen data belongs in structured markup. Product schema with real attributes makes your listings legible to search engines and to assistants answering "is X gluten free". It's a small amount of work with an unusually direct payoff in a category where people ask exactly those questions.

Serving suggestions are search traffic. "How to make a [your product] spritz" is a real query with real volume, and it's a query you're uniquely qualified to answer. Recipe pages using recipe markup are among the cheapest genuine traffic available to a drinks brand, and they convert to stockist lookups.

Events and venues deserve pages. If your product is served somewhere or you appear at festivals, those are searchable, local, and evergreen if maintained.

Age-restricted advertising affects your funnel. Ad platforms restrict targeting for alcohol, remarketing options are limited, and some placements are off-limits. That pushes value toward organic search, email, and the trade — which is another argument for the content above.

Building the stockist finder properly

Since this is the page that converts, it's worth spelling out what "properly" means.

Structure it as data, not a page. Stockists should live in a spreadsheet, a CMS collection or a simple database — name, address, region, type (retail, bar, restaurant, online), and a link. The page renders from that source. The moment stockists are hand-typed into a page, updating them becomes a developer task and it stops happening.

Give regions their own URLs. A single page listing every stockist ranks for nothing local. Region or city pages — one per market where you have real distribution — can rank for "where to buy [brand] in [place]", which is exactly what people search. This is the same clustering logic that works for any content-heavy site, applied to retail.

Let people filter by what they want. Buy a bottle, or drink one somewhere? Those are different intents and mixing them in one list serves neither.

Handle the empty state honestly. If someone searches a region with no stockists, don't show nothing. Offer the nearest alternatives, an online option if you have one, and a way to tell you they want it locally — that list is genuinely useful to your sales team, because it's a map of demand you're not serving.

Give it an owner and a review date. A stockist list is a perishable asset. Somebody in sales knows when an account is lost or won; the site needs to hear about it. A quarterly review in a calendar beats good intentions.

Track the interactions. Clicks on a stockist, filters used, regions searched with no results. That's the closest thing a shop-window brand has to conversion data, and it's genuinely useful to the commercial team — the "searched with no results" report is a distribution roadmap.

Compliance, without pretending to be your lawyer

A short, honest section, because this is where web agencies overreach.

The rules governing alcohol marketing and sales vary by jurisdiction and change: what you may claim, whether you can associate the product with certain activities or imagery, how prominently health or responsibility messaging must appear, what you can say about strength or provenance, and whether you can ship at all. Some markets regulate the advertising, some regulate the sale, most regulate both, and the details are genuinely intricate.

What we'd tell any drinks brand about the website specifically:

• Decide your markets first. The site's structure depends on where you can sell and advertise. This is not a detail to resolve during build.
• Get the constraints in writing before design. Required statements, prohibited claims, imagery rules. Retrofitting a mandatory disclosure into a finished layout produces something that satisfies nobody.
• Keep responsibility messaging in the template, not typed onto individual pages, so it can't be forgotten on the next page someone adds.
• Assume the age overlay is a courtesy, not a control. Anything behind it should be safe to be public, because it effectively is.
• Version your claims. If a certification, award or ingredient statement changes, you need to find every page that mentions it. Store those as data where you can, not as prose typed in forty places.
• Ask before you copy a competitor. They may be operating under different licensing, in a different market, or simply be non-compliant.

None of that is legal advice, and any agency offering you legal advice on alcohol marketing should worry you. The useful thing a web team can do is build a site whose structure makes compliance easy to maintain rather than a thing that decays every time someone adds a page.

What a good drinks site contains

The two rows that don't exist on most sites — serves and trade — are the two that reliably earn.

The photography brief that saves the most money

In this category photography is the largest content cost and the most reused asset, so it's worth briefing once, properly.

What a drinks brand actually needs, and what gets forgotten:

• Product on white, straight on, high resolution. Boring, essential, and the one every retailer, marketplace and delivery app will ask for. Shoot every format and every variant.
• Product on white with the label square to camera. Different from the above, and needed wherever your label has to be legible at thumbnail size.
• The serve, not just the bottle. What it looks like poured, in the correct glass, garnished the way you'd want it. This is what makes recipe pages work and what people share.
• Context shots with room for text. Wide compositions with quiet areas so a designer can place headlines without covering the product. Beautiful tight crops with no negative space cannot become a hero image, and this is the single most common gap in a drinks shoot.
• Multiple aspect ratios of the hero moments. A 16:9 crop and a vertical crop of the same setup. Otherwise every social placement and every mobile hero becomes a compromise.
• The people and the place, if there are any. Where it's made, who makes it. This is the story section's only real material, and it's much harder to shoot later.
• Detail shots. Label texture, closure, ingredients raw. These fill product pages and press packs, and they age well.

Two rules that save budget. Shoot for reuse: every image should be usable in at least three places — site, retail listing, social. And shoot the boring ones first, because the on-white product shots are the ones a distributor will need next week, while the lifestyle set is the one everybody wants to spend the day on.

One further note specific to this category: if you use generated or heavily composited imagery for concepts, keep it clearly separate from the assets you send to retail. Channel partners publish what you give them, and an image that was only ever meant as a mood reference has a way of ending up on a product listing.

Where the effort should go

If the budget is limited, in order:

1. Product pages with real detail. Taste, ingredients, ABV, formats, and a link to where to buy. This is what search wants and what a buyer needs.
2. A stockist finder with its own URL and an owner.
3. Recipes and serving suggestions, properly marked up.
4. The trade section. Even a single well-built page with specs and a contact.
5. The brand story, which is where everyone wants to start and where the least measurable return is.

That order will feel backwards to a founder, because the story is the thing they most want to tell. The story does matter — it's often the whole reason the brand exists. It just doesn't need to be built first, and it shouldn't consume the budget that the stockist finder needed.

If you're building or rebuilding a drinks brand site and want a second opinion on the structure before design starts, send us what you have — the age gate and the stockist page are usually where the money's being lost, and both are cheap to fix.