Do I Need a Website If I Already Have a Facebook Page?

You will find a hundred articles that answer this with "yes, absolutely, and here's my number". So let me start with the part they leave out: if your Facebook page is bringing you all the work you can handle, a website is not urgent. It might not even be next.

But a page and a website do genuinely different jobs, and it's worth knowing which job you're currently not doing — so the decision is yours rather than a sales pitch's.

What a Facebook page is actually good at

Credit where it's due. A page is very good at things a website is bad at:

• Being found by people who weren't looking. The feed puts you in front of someone's cousin. A website cannot do that.
• Proof of life. Posts with dates show you're still trading, which is a real trust signal.
• Conversation. Messages, comments, reviews from real named people in your town.
• Free and immediate. No build, no bill, no waiting.

If that's working, it's working. Nobody should talk you out of a channel that brings in customers.

The four things a page structurally can't do

These aren't opinions about design. They're limits of the platform.

1. Be found by someone searching for what you sell

Somebody typing "emergency plumber" plus your town into Google is the most valuable visitor in your business: they have the problem right now and they're looking for a supplier. Search results mostly show websites and map listings. If you have neither, that person becomes your competitor's customer, and you will never know they existed.

2. Explain something complicated

A page is a stream. Your pricing, your process, your service area and your opening hours scroll away and get buried. A visitor with a specific question — do you cover my postcode, do you do commercial, how much roughly — has to scroll, or message you and wait. Some of them won't.

3. Exist independently of somebody else's decisions

Your page lives on land you rent. Reach changes because a ranking system changed. Accounts get suspended in error and take weeks to recover. It is rare, it is not rare enough to bet a business on, and there is no appeal you control.

own the front door. rent the billboards.

4. Look like a business to someone deciding to trust you

This one cuts both ways and depends entirely on who your customers are. A dog groomer with 400 local followers and photos of actual dogs looks more trustworthy on Facebook than on a stiff website. A business asking a company for a £12,000 contract does not.

So which side are you on?

Go through these honestly. They're about your situation, not about what websites are theoretically for.

If you're mostly in the left column: congratulations, you've just saved a few hundred pounds. Set up the Google Business Profile, put your phone number in your page's About section where a human can find it, and get back to work.

When a very simple website is genuinely enough

There is a middle option that almost nobody sells you, because it's the smallest thing anyone can charge for: one page.

One page with your name, what you do, who for, where, a phone number, a form, a handful of photographs of your own work, and your prices or a range. That's it. It's findable in search, it's yours, it answers the repeated questions, and it takes about four seconds to read.

You can build that yourself on a builder for a couple of hundred a year — that is a real and respectable answer, and I've written about when DIY is the right call. Or my smallest package, The Starter, is a one-page site at $799, which includes the form delivering to an address you own and the basic search fundamentals set up properly.

What I'd avoid is the middle mistake: paying for seven pages because a website is "supposed" to have seven pages, then leaving five of them empty and out of date. A stale website is worse for trust than no website. That's a redesign trigger in itself.

Use both, and point them at each other

The version that works isn't website-instead-of-Facebook. It's:

1. 01Facebook keeps doing what it's good at — showing up in feeds, proving you're active, taking messages.
2. 02The website is the place everything points to and nothing scrolls away: prices, service area, the form, the proof.
3. 03Your Google Business Profile links to the website, so search sends you people who were already looking.

Three places, one job each, and the only one you actually own is the one holding the information you can't afford to lose.

The honest summary

No, you don't need a website to run a business, and anyone who tells you your business isn't real without one is selling something. What you need is to be findable when someone is looking, able to answer the same questions without typing them again, and not standing entirely on ground somebody else owns.

Facebook covers the first part badly, the second part poorly and the third part not at all. Whether that's worth $799 to fix depends on how much one lost customer is worth to you — which only you can do the maths on.