Published 2 September 2026 · Updated 2 September 2026
Do I need a website, or is a Facebook page enough?
You need a website if people search for what you do before choosing, if you need to be found by someone who has never heard of you, if you take bookings or payments, or if anyone ever has to check whether you are legitimate before spending money. A Facebook or Instagram page is genuinely sufficient for a small number of businesses, mainly those that fill entirely through word of mouth and a local following, sell through the platform itself, and have no ambition to grow beyond that. For everyone else, social media is where you talk to people who already know you, and a website is where people who do not yet know you decide whether to trust you.
Key takeaways
- Social and a website do different jobs. Social reaches people who already follow you. A website catches people actively searching for what you sell.
- You do not own your social presence. Accounts get restricted, hacked or lost, algorithms change, and there is no appeal process worth relying on.
- Most people check before they buy. A business with no website looks less established, particularly for anything expensive or infrequent.
- Social pages barely appear in search results for the terms that actually bring you customers.
- A useful website can be five pages. The choice is not between nothing and a large project.
- Some businesses genuinely do not need one. If you are fully booked from word of mouth and not trying to grow, that is a legitimate answer.
What this guide covers
- They do different jobs
- What a social page is genuinely good at
- What a social page cannot do for you
- The rented land problem
- When you definitely need a website
- When social alone is genuinely fine
- What a useful website actually needs
- What it costs, honestly
- Using both together
- What about Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn instead?
- Mistakes people make either way
- Frequently asked questions
They do different jobs
The question is usually framed as a choice between two things that do the same job at different prices. They do not do the same job, and once that is clear the decision is much easier.
A social page reaches people who already know you
Your followers, people your followers share with, and anyone who searches for you by name on that platform. It is a broadcast channel to an existing audience and it is excellent at maintaining relationships, showing personality and staying visible day to day.
A website catches people who are looking for what you sell
Someone who types ’emergency plumber near me’ or ‘wedding photographer Calgary prices’ at the moment they need it. They do not know your name and they are not scrolling. They are searching, and social pages are not what search engines return for those queries.
The distinction is between demand you have already built and demand that already exists. Social media helps you build and maintain your own audience. Search puts you in front of people whose need arrived independently of you, usually at the exact moment they intend to buy. Most small businesses need both, and the ones that struggle most are usually the ones doing only the first while assuming it covers the second.
A quick test Ask your last ten customers how they found you. If most say a friend, an existing customer or your own social post, your social presence is working. If any of them say they searched for what you do, or that they looked you up before getting in touch, those people encountered your website, or noticed you did not have one.
“Social media reaches people who already know you. Search reaches people who need what you sell and have never heard of you.”
What a social page is genuinely good at
It is worth being fair about this, because the case for a website is often made by understating how useful social actually is.
Where social does the better job
- Showing the work as it happens. Before and after photos, work in progress, new stock, today’s specials. Immediate, low effort, and genuinely engaging in a way a static website page is not.
- Staying present between purchases. If someone buys from you twice a year, being in their feed occasionally is worth more than a website they have no reason to revisit.
- Personality and trust through familiarity. People buy from people, and social is much better at showing who you are than an About page.
- Conversation and quick questions. Direct messages are often how customers prefer to make first contact, and the response is instant.
- Community and local reach. Local groups, shares between neighbours, and event visibility are real and hard to replicate elsewhere.
- Low-cost testing. Trying a new product or offer and seeing the response takes an hour and costs nothing.
If someone tells you social media does not matter for a small business, they are wrong. The problem is not that social is ineffective. The problem is that it is being asked to do a second job it is structurally unable to do.
What a social page cannot do for you
Six specific limitations, all of which matter more the more you want to grow.
- (‘It does not appear in search for the terms that bring customers’, ‘Search for a service plus a city and you will get websites, map listings and directories. Social profiles occasionally appear for a business name, rarely for anything else. The searches where someone is ready to buy are almost entirely served by websites.’)
- (‘You cannot control the experience’, ‘Information is buried in a feed, ordered by the platform, interrupted by suggested posts, and framed by whatever the platform is testing that month. A visitor with a specific question has to scroll to find the answer, and most will not.’)
- (‘It is hostile to the basics’, ‘Prices, service areas, opening hours, qualifications, how to book, what happens after you enquire. All of it lives in a pinned post or a bio link and none of it is where someone expects to find it.’)
- (‘It looks less established for considered purchases’, “For a coffee shop this hardly matters. For anything expensive, infrequent or involving access to someone’s home, finances or family, the absence of a website is noticed. People check.”)
- (‘You cannot capture or own the relationship’, ‘No email list, no way to reach your audience if the platform stops showing your posts, no data about who visited and what they were interested in.’)
- (‘It is not yours’, ‘Which is significant enough to deserve its own section.’)
The rented land problem
Everything you build on a social platform sits on land you rent from a company whose interests are not the same as yours. Most of the time this is fine and invisible. The times it is not fine are severe and there is very little you can do about them.
What actually happens to real businesses
- Accounts get disabled by automated systems. Often for something the owner cannot identify, sometimes for nothing at all. Appeals are automated, slow and frequently unsuccessful, and there is usually no human to speak to.
- Accounts get hacked. A compromised page can be renamed, stripped, or used to run ads billed to the owner’s card. Recovery is difficult and sometimes impossible.
- Organic reach changes without notice. Businesses that built large followings have watched the proportion of followers who see a post decline steadily, with the paid option offered as the remedy.
- Platforms change what they favour. An account built around photos becomes an account expected to make videos. What worked last year quietly stops working.
- Platforms decline or become unfashionable. Audiences move, and the following you spent five years building does not move with you automatically.
The question that makes this concrete If your main social account disappeared this afternoon with no warning and no appeal, how would a new customer find you tomorrow, and how would you contact the people who already follow you? If the honest answer is that you could not do either, that is the actual risk you are carrying, and a basic website plus an email list removes most of it.
A domain and a website are the one part of your online presence you genuinely control. Your domain name is yours as long as you renew it. Your content is yours and you can move it between hosts. Your email list belongs to you rather than to a platform. None of this means abandoning social media. It means not making a rented channel the only route to your business.
When you definitely need a website
If any of these describe your business, the question is settled and it is worth stopping the debate.
People search before choosing you
Trades, professional services, health and wellness practitioners, anything where the customer types a service and a location into Google. This is the largest category by a wide margin.
The purchase is considered or expensive
Anything where someone weighs options, checks credentials or discusses it with a partner before deciding. The absence of a website reads as a lack of establishment at exactly the moment they are assessing risk.
You take bookings, orders or payments
A proper booking flow, an online store, deposits, forms. Social platforms handle none of this well and the workarounds are fragile.
You sell to other businesses
Business buyers check. Procurement processes, supplier forms and internal approvals frequently require a website, and having none can quietly disqualify you before anyone speaks to you.
You need to explain something
Complex services, multiple packages, eligibility criteria, a process with stages. This information cannot live usefully in a feed.
You are hiring, applying for funding, or seeking partners
Candidates, funders and potential partners all look you up. What they find, or fail to find, shapes the conversation before it starts.
There is also a compounding argument. A website accumulates value over time in a way social posts do not. A page you wrote two years ago answering a common customer question can still be bringing in enquiries today. A post from two years ago is functionally gone. If you intend to still be running this business in five years, the case for owning something that compounds is strong.
When social alone is genuinely fine
Advice on this subject is usually written by people who sell websites, which is worth keeping in mind, including here. There are real situations where a website adds little and the honest answer is not to bother yet.
You can reasonably skip it if
- You are fully booked from word of mouth and not trying to grow. If you turn work away and have no ambition to expand, a website solves a problem you do not have.
- You sell entirely through a platform’s own marketplace. If your sales happen inside an established marketplace or platform storefront and that is your whole model, that storefront is effectively your site.
- You are testing an idea. For the first few months of working out whether a business idea has legs, a social page and a way to be contacted is a reasonable, cheap starting point.
- Your entire customer base is a local community you are already embedded in, your purchases are small and frequent, and nobody researches before buying. A neighbourhood food stall is a different situation from a bookkeeper.
- You are a side project with no revenue goal. Not everything needs infrastructure.
The middle option nobody mentions If you are unsure, a single well-built page with your name, what you do, where you work, prices or a price range, how to get in touch, and a few examples of your work will handle almost everything a small business needs from a website. It can be built in a day and it costs very little to run. You do not have to choose between nothing and a full site.
What tends to happen is that businesses in the ‘genuinely fine’ category stay there for a while and then move out of it: they want to grow, or word of mouth slows, or a competitor with a decent website starts taking the searches. The signal to watch for is the first time you turn down work because someone could not find enough information about you, or the first time a customer says they nearly went elsewhere because they could not tell whether you were still operating.
What a useful website actually needs
A great deal of anxiety about websites comes from imagining a much bigger project than is required. For most small businesses, five pages does the job, and a single well-built page does most of it.
- (‘A home page that says what you do, for whom, and where’, ‘Within the first screen, in plain language, using the words your customers would use. The most common failure here is a homepage that describes a philosophy rather than a service.’)
- (‘A page for each main service’, ‘This is the part that gets you found. One page per thing you want people to search for, titled accordingly. Three services means three pages, not one page with three paragraphs.’)
- (‘Prices, or at least a range’, ‘The most requested and most frequently omitted information on small business websites. If you cannot publish fixed prices, publish a starting figure, a typical range, or an example project with its cost. Withholding it entirely loses you enquiries from people who would have been happy with the number.’)
- (‘Proof’, ‘Photos of real work, reviews with names, client logos, before and afters, credentials and insurance where relevant. This is what converts someone who is already interested.’)
- (‘An obvious way to get in touch’, ‘Phone number visible on every page and clickable on mobile, a short form, and your actual response time. Long forms asking for information you do not need are a reliable way to lose enquiries.’)
- (‘Your service area and hours’, ‘Especially for local businesses. This is also what helps you appear for location-based searches.’)
- (‘Links to your social accounts’, ‘So the two support each other rather than competing.’)
What you do not need at the start A blog you will not maintain, a custom design, animations, a chatbot, a members area, or a page for every possible question. These are additions to a working site, not prerequisites for one. Sites that never launch are usually sites where the scope kept growing.
Two non-negotiables regardless of size. It has to work properly on a phone, because that is where most people will see it, and it has to load quickly, because a slow site loses visitors before they read anything. Both are default behaviour on any competently built modern site, and both are worth checking before you accept the work as finished.
What it costs, honestly
Prices vary widely and the range quoted for the same brief can differ by a factor of ten. Broadly, there are four routes.
Do it yourself on a site builder
Lowest cost, paid monthly. You are trading money for your own time, and the time is usually more than expected. Fine if you enjoy it or have very simple needs. The common trap is spending forty hours producing something that a professional would have delivered in a week.
A template site set up for you
A designer or productised service configures a proven template with your content, branding and structure. Fast, predictable, and the best value for most small businesses. What you are paying for is the decisions and the setup, not bespoke design.
A custom-designed site
A designer and often a developer build something specific to you. Appropriate when your business genuinely needs something unusual, when brand differentiation is central, or when you have complex functionality. Overkill for a business that needs five pages.
Ongoing management
Hosting, updates, security, backups and small changes, either bundled with the build or bought separately. Whichever route you take, budget something here. Unmaintained sites break, get hacked or slowly rot.
The costs that catch people out are not the build. They are the domain renewal, hosting, any premium plugins or subscriptions, and the fact that nobody is available to make a change six months later. Ask about all four before you commit, and specifically ask what happens when you want to update your prices.
Two things to check before you hire anyone First, that you will own the domain and the site, with your own account access, rather than the provider owning them on your behalf. Second, what it costs and how difficult it is to leave. Both questions are entirely reasonable to ask, and the answers tell you a lot about who you are dealing with.
Using both together
The businesses that get the most out of this do not treat it as a choice at all. They use each channel for what it is good at and connect them deliberately.
A simple working pattern
- Social is where you show the work and stay visible. Frequent, informal, current.
- The website is where the detail lives. Services, prices, process, proof, contact.
- Every social bio links to the website, and to a specific page rather than only the homepage where that makes sense.
- The website links out to your active social accounts, so someone who wants to see recent work can find it.
- Both point at your Google Business Profile and at your reviews, since that is what local customers check.
- Collect email addresses on the website, even slowly. It is the only audience you own outright, and it is the insurance against everything in the rented land section.
- Reuse content in both directions. A question you answered in a comment thread is a website page. A page you wrote is a week of posts.
One more practical point. If you are running paid social ads, sending that traffic to a social profile rather than a purpose-built page on your own site wastes a good part of what you are spending. Ads work considerably better when they land somewhere designed to convert, with the offer, the proof and the next step all in one place.
What about Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn instead?
The reasoning above applies to every social platform, but each one fails in a slightly different way, and it is worth knowing which limitation you are running into.
Strong for anything visual: food, trades with visible results, beauty, interiors, events, retail. The specific weakness is links. You get one clickable link in the bio and none in ordinary posts, which means every time someone wants to book, buy or read more, you are asking them to remember to go and find it. That friction costs more enquiries than most owners realise.
TikTok
The best organic reach available to a small business with no following, and the least reliable. Reach is driven by the algorithm rather than by your audience, so a good month tells you very little about the next one. It also skews toward discovery and entertainment rather than intent, which means viewers are rarely ready to buy at that moment. Somewhere to send them matters more here, not less.
Genuinely useful for business-to-business services, recruitment and professional credibility, and a personal profile there often outperforms a company page. But business buyers are the audience most likely to check your website before a meeting, most likely to need to forward something to a colleague, and most likely to have a procurement process that asks for a company website.
A marketplace or platform storefront
If your sales happen entirely inside an established marketplace, that storefront is doing the job of a website and you may not need another. The trade-off is that the platform owns the customer relationship, sets the fees, and can change either at any time.
The pattern across all four is the same. Each platform is good at one part of the journey and bad at the part where somebody decides to spend money with you. A website is not a competitor to any of them; it is the place all of them send people when the person is ready.
If you only fix one thing on your social accounts Make the link in your bio go somewhere useful. Not your homepage by default, but the page that matches what you post about: the booking page, the price list, the specific service. A link that lands on the exact thing someone just saw converts far better than one that makes them navigate.
Mistakes people make either way
Worth avoiding
- Treating it as either-or. They are complementary, and the businesses doing best use both deliberately.
- Building a website and then abandoning it. An outdated site with last year’s prices and a closed location does more harm than none at all.
- Hiding prices entirely. The most requested information on small business websites, and the most commonly withheld. A range beats silence.
- Scoping a first website too large. Five good pages that exist beat fifteen planned pages that never launch.
- Not owning your own domain. If a provider registered it in their name, you do not control your own address. Check this today if you are unsure.
- No email list. The single best protection against losing a social account, and almost nobody starts it early enough.
- Sending paid ad traffic to a social profile instead of a page built to convert.
- Assuming a website removes the need to be findable. A site nobody links to and that targets no real searches will sit there quietly. It has to be set up to be found.
The short version: if people search before they choose you, if the purchase is considered, or if losing your social account would leave you with no way to be found, you need a website. It does not have to be big, it does not have to be expensive, and it does not replace the social presence that is already working for you. It gives you somewhere that is yours, that appears when someone is actually looking to buy, and that keeps working long after a post has scrolled out of view.
Not sure what you actually need?
We build straightforward, fast websites for small businesses, and we will tell you honestly if you do not need one yet. Have a look at how it works, or get in touch and describe your situation.
Frequently asked questions
Is a Facebook page enough for a small business?
It is enough if you are fully booked through word of mouth, sell through the platform itself, and are not trying to grow. For most businesses it is not, because social pages do not appear in search results for the terms customers use when they are ready to buy, and because you do not control or own the account.
Do I still need a website in 2026?
Yes, if people search for what you do before choosing, if the purchase is considered or expensive, if you take bookings or payments, or if you sell to other businesses. Social media reaches people who already follow you. A website reaches people who need what you sell and have never heard of you, at the moment they are looking.
What is the minimum a small business website needs?
A home page that says what you do and where, a page for each main service, prices or a price range, proof such as photos and reviews, an obvious way to get in touch with a clickable phone number, and your service area and hours. Five pages covers most small businesses, and a single well-built page covers a lot of them.
How much does a small business website cost?
It varies by route: a self-built site builder is cheapest in money and most expensive in your time; a professionally set-up template site is the best value for most small businesses; a fully custom build costs considerably more and is unnecessary for a five-page site. Whichever you choose, budget for hosting, domain renewal and ongoing maintenance, and ask what a change costs six months later.
Should I put my prices on my website?
Yes, or at least a range or a typical project cost. It is the most requested information on small business websites and the most commonly left off. Withholding it does not create more enquiries, it creates fewer and worse ones, because people who would have been comfortable with your price never get to find that out.
What happens if my social media account gets banned or hacked?
You may lose the account, the following and any way to contact those people, often with no effective appeal. This is the strongest practical argument for having a website and an email list: they are the parts of your presence you actually own, and they let a new customer find you tomorrow if a platform disappears today.
Can I just use Google Business Profile instead of a website?
It is a genuinely important listing for any local business and it can generate enquiries on its own, so claim and complete it either way. But it is limited to a fixed set of fields, cannot explain a service in depth, cannot take a booking flow of your own design, and is another account you do not control. It works best pointing at a website, not replacing one.
Should my website or my social media come first?
If you are testing an idea, social first is reasonable and cheap. Once you have customers, or the moment you notice people searching for what you do and not finding you, build a simple website. Do not wait until you can afford a large project, because five good pages that exist are worth more than a bigger site you keep postponing.