Do I need a website if I have a Facebook page?
I hear this question almost every week. A small business owner — maybe a plumber, a hairdresser, a dog walker, or a local cafe owner — tells me their Facebook page is doing alright. They get the odd message, a booking now and then, and a few likes on their posts. So why bother with a website?
It is a fair question. Facebook is free. It is familiar. You can post photos of your work, collect reviews, and reply to messages without learning any technical skills. For a brand-new business with no budget, it is a reasonable first step.
But here is the problem: a Facebook page is not a replacement for a website. And if you are relying on it as your only online presence, you are almost certainly losing customers without knowing it.
Your Facebook page is rented land
This is the hard truth that most small business owners do not think about until it is too late. Facebook owns your page. Not you. They control the algorithm, the layout, the rules — and they change all of them whenever they feel like it.
Remember October 2021 when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down for six hours? Businesses that relied solely on Facebook were completely cut off from their customers for an entire working day. That was not the last outage either — they have become more frequent.
Beyond outages, there is the algorithm problem. Organic reach for business pages has plummeted to around 2.2% in 2025. That means if you have 1,000 followers, only about 22 of them will actually see any given post unless you pay to boost it. Facebook has become a pay-to-play platform with over 10 million advertisers competing for attention.
A website is yours. You own the domain. You control the content. Nobody can throttle your visibility or change the rules overnight.
Google does not rank Facebook pages the way you think
When a potential customer types “plumber near me” or “best hair salon in Manchester” into Google, what do they see? They see websites. Google local search results — the ones that appear at the top of the page with the map — are dominated by businesses with proper websites.
Your Facebook page might show up somewhere in the results, but it will not rank prominently. Google prioritises websites with dedicated content, proper SEO structure, and consistent business information across the web. A Facebook page gives Google almost none of those signals.
The data backs this up: 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. If you do not have a website, you are invisible to nearly half of the people searching for services like yours.
How much is it actually costing you?
Let us put some numbers on this. A local business that relies only on Facebook might get 10–15 enquiries a month from their page. A similar business with a well-optimised website and a Google Business Profile can easily see 40–60 enquiries from organic search alone — on top of whatever they get from social media.
If each enquiry is worth an average job value of, say, £150–£300, that is potentially £4,500–£15,000 in missed revenue every single month.
Even a conservative estimate — say 10 extra enquiries per month at £100 each — works out to £12,000 a year. A professional website costs a fraction of that.
So the question is not really “can I afford a website?” It is “can I afford not to have one?”
What a website gives you that Facebook cannot
A website works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It never runs out of reach, never gets shadow-banned, and never asks you to boost a post. It is your digital shopfront that is always open.
It also builds credibility. 75% of consumers judge a company credibility based on its website design. When someone hears about your business and Googles you, finding nothing — or only a Facebook page — raises questions. A professional website signals that you are established, trustworthy, and serious about what you do.
And here is something Facebook simply cannot do: rank for search terms you care about. If you are a wedding photographer in Bristol, a properly optimised website can appear on the first page of Google when someone searches “Bristol wedding photographer.” Facebook cannot compete with that level of targeted visibility.
The good news: you do not need to choose
This is not about abandoning your Facebook page. It is about adding a website to your toolkit so you are not putting all your eggs in someone else basket.
Use Facebook for what it is good at — building community, sharing updates, engaging with customers. Use your website for everything else — being found on Google, building credibility, and capturing enquiries while you sleep.
The smartest approach is to have both. Your Facebook page drives engagement. Your website drives business. They work together.
What should you do next?
If you are a UK small business owner and your only online presence is a Facebook page, I would encourage you to think about what you are missing. Start with a simple, professional website — even just a few pages that explain who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch.
At Dotjuice, we build straightforward, affordable websites for UK small businesses that actually show up on Google. No jargon, no nonsense, just a site that works for you.
Get in touch if you would like to talk about getting online properly.
