Do I need a website if I have a Facebook page?

Plenty of small businesses run perfectly well with just a Facebook page. It’s free, your customers are already there, and posting a photo of your latest job takes seconds. So it’s a fair question: why pay for a website at all?

The short answer is that a Facebook page is a great place to talk to customers, but a risky place to keep your business. Here’s why, and what to do first if you only want to do one thing.

What Facebook does well

• It’s free and quick to set up.
• Your customers are already on it, so posts can reach people who know you.
• It’s easy to keep fresh. Photos of your work, offers and news take moments.
• People can message you and leave recommendations.

For a lot of local businesses, that’s a genuinely useful tool, and you should keep using it.

Where it falls short

You’re building on someone else’s land. Every post, photo and follower you gather on Facebook lives on Meta’s platform, under Meta’s rules. Facebook decides who sees your posts, and if you ever stop using it, you can’t take your followers with you. All that effort goes into a space you rent, not one you own.

You don’t control it. Meta’s terms say it can remove or restrict content, and its own enforcement pages explain that it can disable accounts. Most businesses never have a problem, but if it happens, your page and everything on it can disappear, and there’s little you can do.

There’s a login wall. Not everyone has a Facebook account, and people who aren’t signed in are often asked to log in before they can see much. Someone who just wants your opening hours may give up and try the next business.

It’s harder for some people to use. Menus, price lists and offers are often posted on Facebook as photos. The W3C, which sets the standards for accessible websites, explains that people can’t change how text looks in an image, so anyone who needs bigger text or a screen reader can struggle to read them. Google can’t read them properly either. On your own site, that information can be real text that works for everyone.

The important details get buried. Your prices, the areas you cover and how to get in touch are scattered through months of posts. A website puts them on one clear page.

It does less for Google. When someone nearby searches for what you do, Google tends to show a map of local businesses and a list of websites. Google says a complete, accurate Business Profile helps you show up in local results, and a website gives that profile something to link to.

If you only do one thing

Set up your Google Business Profile. It’s free, and it’s what shows your business on Google Maps and in local searches, with your hours, phone number, photos and reviews. Our guide to setting up your Google Business Profile properly walks you through it.

Then own your part of the internet

Keep using Facebook, and Instagram if you like. They’re good places to talk to customers. But put your real effort into somewhere that’s yours: a website on your own domain name, like yourbusiness.co.uk.

It doesn’t need to be big or expensive. A few clear pages, saying what you do, showing your work and making it easy to get in touch, is enough. And it’s portable: your address and your content go with you if you change who builds or hosts it, and nobody can switch it off or decide who gets to see it.

Let your Google profile and your Facebook page point people there. If that sounds about right, our Simple site is built for exactly this.