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

This is the question I get more than any other, and the person asking it is usually not being lazy. They already have a page. It has photos, hours, a phone number, a few hundred people who follow it. Customers message it and they answer. It works.

So the honest answer is: yes, you need a website, but not for the reason you have probably been told. It is not because a Facebook page looks unprofessional. It is because of who can find it, and who owns it.

The people searching for you are not on Facebook

When somebody needs a plumber at nine on a Saturday night, they do not open Facebook and search. They open Google, or they ask their phone. That is where the intent is. Somebody scrolling Facebook is being shown things; somebody searching is looking for something. Those are completely different customers and only one of them is ready to call you.

Your Facebook page can appear in Google results, and sometimes it does. But it appears as a Facebook page — with Facebook’s layout, Facebook’s login prompts, and a “See more” link that hides the thing the person came to read. A meaningful number of people will bounce off that. Not because they hate Facebook, but because they are standing in a driveway with one hand free and they wanted your hours.

You are renting, and you cannot see the lease

Everything on that page belongs to Meta. That is not a conspiracy, it is just the arrangement. What it means in practice:

• The reach of your posts is set by an algorithm you do not control and cannot appeal. Businesses that used to reach most of their followers now reach a fraction of them, and nobody sent a letter about it.
• Pages get suspended, sometimes by mistake, sometimes because someone hacked an admin account. Getting one back is a support queue, not a phone call.
• Your customer list is not yours. The people who follow your page are Meta’s audience, and you can only reach them on Meta’s terms.

I am not telling you to delete the page. Keep it. Post to it. But it should be a place you talk to people who already know you — not the only address you have.

What a website does that a page cannot

It answers questions before somebody calls. The single most useful thing a small business website does is take the ten questions you answer on the phone every week and put them on a page. Do you take that insurance. Do you work on that model. How far will you travel. Is there parking. What does the first visit involve. Every one of those answered in plain language is a call you did not have to take and a customer who did not go elsewhere because they could not tell.

It tells search engines what you are. A website can carry structured information — your address, your hours, your service area, in a form built for machines to read rather than for people to squint at. That is what puts you in the right results instead of the wrong ones.

It works when somebody asks an assistant instead. More people are now skipping the search box and asking ChatGPT or Google’s AI answer for a recommendation. Those systems answer from what is written about a business in clear, readable language. They read websites well. They read a Facebook page badly, because most of what is on a Facebook page is inside an app rather than on a page.

It belongs to you. The domain is yours. The words are yours. If you decide next year that you hate the design, you change the design and everything keeps working.

What it does not have to be

Here is where I part company with a lot of the industry.

A small business website does not need to be big. Most of the ones I build are a handful of pages. A home page that says what you do and where. A page for each of the two or three things people actually search for. A page about you, because in a small town people want to know who they are calling. Contact details on every single page.

It does not need a blog you will never write, a booking system you do not want, a photo gallery of eleven pictures of the same room, or a chat widget that makes a noise. Every one of those is something somebody sold to somebody. If you do not need it, it is not a feature, it is a thing that can break.

It does not need to cost what you have been quoted. I will not put my prices on this page, because the honest number depends on what you actually need and I would rather tell you than have you guess. But the reason quotes for small business websites run high is usually not the website. It is the account manager, the monthly platform fee, the retainer, and the fact that the work was subcontracted twice before anyone opened an editor. A one-person shop building a small site has none of that.

The version of this I would actually recommend

If you have a Facebook page that is working and no website at all, do this in order:

1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile. Free, thirty minutes, and it is what puts you on the map when somebody searches nearby. Do this before you spend a penny on anything else.
2. Get a small website up with your real information on it. Hours, address, phone, what you do, the questions you keep getting asked.
3. Keep posting on Facebook. Now you have somewhere to send people from it.

That order matters. I have watched people spend on a website while their Google listing still had the wrong hours and no photos, and then wonder why nothing changed.

The short version

A Facebook page is a good place to talk to people who already found you. A website is how people who have never heard of you find you at all, and it is the only one of the two you own.

If you are not sure which parts of this apply to you, that is a normal place to be. Tell me what you have now and I will tell you what I would actually do about it — including if the answer is that your page is fine for another year.