Do I need a website if I have Facebook?

What Facebook and Instagram genuinely do well

Let's start by being fair to the free option, because it's better at some things than any website will ever be:

• It's free and instant. A page can be live before your tea goes cold, costs nothing, and needs no technical knowledge at all. As a day-one presence for a brand-new business, it's unbeatable.
• It's where the conversation already is. Local Facebook groups - the "recommend me a plumber" threads - drive real work for real businesses on the Fylde coast every single day. You can't join those conversations from a website.
• It shows you're alive. A page posting this week's cakes, this week's jobs, this week's availability signals an active, trading business in a way a static site can't. For visual work - food, hair, joinery, photography - an Instagram grid is a genuinely excellent portfolio.
• Messaging works. Plenty of customers, especially younger ones, would rather send a Messenger or Instagram DM than fill in a form or ring a number. Meeting them there wins business.
• Reviews and recommendations live there too, and they carry weight inside that community.

If the argument for a website required pretending social media doesn't work, it would be a weak argument. Social works. The case for a website is about the things a page cannot do - not because you're using it wrong, but because of what it is.

What a page can't do, no matter how well you run it

It can't win Google searches. This is the big one. When someone needs a roofer, an accountant or a room for the weekend, most don't scroll Facebook - they search Google for the thing plus the town. Those results are won by websites and Google Business Profiles; content posted inside Facebook is largely invisible to Google, and a page essentially never ranks for "your trade + your town". Run your own test: search for what you do in your town, and count the Facebook pages on page one. A business that exists only on social has opted out of the moment when people who don't already know you are actively looking to spend money.

You don't own it. Your page, its followers and its years of posts live on Meta's platform, under Meta's rules. Pages get restricted or removed by automated systems - sometimes wrongly, routinely with no human to appeal to - and business owners lose access to their own accounts through hacks or flagged logins. None of this means it will happen to you; it means your entire online presence can sit on rented ground with a landlord who doesn't answer the phone. A website with your own domain is yours - on our plan, literally yours after 12 months, in writing.

The algorithm decides who sees you. When you post to your followers, Facebook shows it to the fraction it chooses - organic reach for pages has been squeezed for years, which is precisely how Meta sells adverts. The "free" page is free the way a pub quiz machine is free. Your website shows everything to everyone who arrives, in the order you chose, every time.

It caps how established you look. Here's the moment that matters: someone's been recommended you in a group, they check you out, and they find only a Facebook page. Plenty will think nothing of it. But some slice of customers - often the older, better-paying, planning-a-bigger-job slice - reads "no website" as "not quite a full business", fairly or not. A page also can't hold what they're looking for in any organised way: services laid out properly, prices, areas covered, credentials, a portfolio that stays in order rather than sinking down a feed.

It's a poor filing cabinet. Everything you post sinks. The brilliant answer you wrote to "do you do X?" is gone in a week, so you type it again, forever. A website holds your answers permanently, findable, linked from wherever the question comes up - including your Facebook page.

When a Facebook page genuinely is enough

Now the part a web design company isn't supposed to write. A page alone is a perfectly rational choice when:

• You're full. Booked solid from repeat customers and word of mouth, no desire to grow - a website would just make the phone ring with work you'd turn down.
• Your customers don't search for the service. Some businesses are found only by referral and community - if nobody googles for what you do, Google visibility is worth little.
• It's a side project or a stall, where the economics don't yet justify even £29.99 a month. Fair enough - a free page and a claimed Google Business Profile (also free) will do the job while you find out if the business has legs.
• You're brand new and testing. Prove people want the thing first; buy the infrastructure second. We'd rather you turned up in a year with a working business than sign up today and cancel in March.

Even in these cases, do one thing: claim the free Google Business Profile. It costs nothing, and it covers a chunk of the search-visibility gap while you're deciding.

How a website and social work together

The framing of "Facebook or a website" is the mistake - the businesses doing this well have both, doing different jobs. The website is the base: it ranks on Google for your trade and your towns, holds your services, prices, portfolio and contact routes in a fixed, skimmable order, and belongs to you. The social pages are the outposts: the living feed, the community presence, the DMs - each one linking back to the base.

In practice the loop looks like this: someone asks a local group for a recommendation; you get named; they tap through to your Facebook page and see you're active and liked; then they hit the website link and get the full picture - proper photos, clear prices, areas covered, a form or a number. Each step raises confidence, and the website is where the decision actually lands. Meanwhile Google searches - the people who never touched Facebook at all - land on the website directly. Take hospitality: guests find Blackpool hotels and B&Bs through search and price-comparison first, and a hotel running only a Facebook page is invisible to nearly all of them. The same logic scales down to a one-person trade.

The division of labour also solves the "what do I post?" problem. The website holds the permanent stuff so the page doesn't have to - you post the fresh stuff (today's job, this week's special) and let the site answer the recurring questions.

So: do you need one?

Honest scoring, then. If new customers find businesses like yours by searching Google - and for trades, salons, accommodation, restaurants and most local services, they do - then yes, the page alone is costing you the customers who never knew you existed. If you're in one of the genuinely-enough cases above, no - keep the page tidy, claim the Google profile, and spend the money on something else.

If it's yes, the follow-up questions are what it costs and how to pay for it, and we've written both up with the same candour as this page: what a website costs in the UK, covering every route including the ones that aren't us. Our own answer is one plan - £99 setup, then £29.99 a month - with hosting, domain, email and unlimited edits included, the site and domain yours after 12 months, and cancel anytime on 30 days' notice. We've been building them from Blackpool since 2016, mostly for exactly the businesses this question comes from.