When you genuinely do not need one
We build websites for a living and we will still tell you when the answer is no. There are real cases where a website is not the right next spend.
- You are fully booked for the next six months and turning work away
- All your work comes through one agency, contractor or referral partner
- You are testing an idea and not sure you will still be doing it in six months
- You sell purely through a marketplace like Etsy or Airbnb and have no plans to change
If any of those describe you, save your money. Come back when the diary starts thinning out or the referral source dries up, because both eventually do.
If someone hears about you at nine at night and searches your name, what do they find? If the answer is nothing, or a page you last posted on in 2023, that is what it is costing you.
What a Facebook page cannot do
Social media is genuinely good at some things. Showing recent work, staying visible to people who already follow you, and letting customers message quickly. Keep doing it.
The problems are structural rather than a matter of effort.
You do not own it
Accounts get restricted, hacked or suspended, occasionally for no reason you will ever be told, and there is frequently no one to appeal to. Businesses do lose a decade of followers overnight. Your website is the one thing in your marketing that cannot be taken away by a policy change.
It barely appears in Google
Someone searching "electrician near me" is not shown Facebook pages. They are shown the map results and websites. If that is where the searching happens and you are not there, you are invisible at the exact moment somebody is ready to buy.
The reach is not yours
Organic reach on business pages has been falling for years. A post now reaches a small fraction of the people who chose to follow you, unless you pay. You built that audience and you rent access to it.
It answers the wrong questions
A feed shows what you did most recently. It does not clearly say what you charge, which areas you cover, whether you are insured, or how to book. Those are the things that decide whether someone calls.
What a website adds that nothing else does
Not glamour. Three fairly boring things that happen to matter.
- It gets found by people ready to buy. Search traffic has intent behind it. Someone typing "emergency plumber Bury" is not browsing, they have a problem right now.
- It answers questions at two in the morning. Prices, areas covered, opening hours, whether you do that specific job. Every question answered on the page is a phone call you did not have to take.
- It makes you look established. Fair or not, people judge. A proper site with real photos and clear pricing reads as a business. A dormant Facebook page reads as a hobby.
There is a fourth that people underestimate. A website makes your social media work harder, because you finally have somewhere to send people from it.
The cost objection, addressed properly
The reason most small businesses do not have a website is not that they think it is pointless. It is that the quote was two and a half grand and they had a van to tax.
That objection was entirely reasonable when the only options were thousands up front or a weekend wrestling with a page builder. It is much weaker now that monthly models exist, where the site costs less per month than a phone contract and nothing at all to start.
If cost was the blocker, the maths has changed. Our guide to what a website should cost works through the three year figures properly.
The verdict
If you are fully booked and happy, you do not need a website and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. If you have any interest in the work that currently goes to a competitor because they came up in a search and you did not, then yes, you need one.
Keep the Facebook page either way. Just stop relying on it to do a job it was never built for.
If you want a straight answer on whether it is worth it for your particular business, ask us. We will tell you honestly, including when the answer is no.