Do I need a website if I have Facebook and Instagram?
Do I need a website if I have Facebook and Instagram? When a page is enough, what it can’t do, and what running both costs.
Do I need a website if I have Facebook and Instagram? If your customers find you by searching, yes, and it isn’t close. If your customers find you by scrolling, or through one busy local group, then a page can be enough for a while, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
The test is where your last ten inquiries came from. Write them down. If more than two or three began with someone typing a service and a town into Google, you’re currently invisible to that entire group of people, because a Facebook page almost never wins those searches. Everything below is detail.
What a Facebook page can’t do#
A page is a stream. It’s built to show what happened recently, which is the opposite of what a customer wants when they’re deciding whether to hire you. They want the price list, the areas covered, the answer to "do you do Saturdays", and a way to send a message that doesn’t require a Facebook account.
- It can’t rank for "kitchen remodeler Muncie" in any reliable way.
- It can’t hold a price list that stays where you put it.
- It can’t give you an email address at your own name.
- It can’t take a deposit or send an invoice.
- It can’t be read by someone who has deleted their account, and plenty of your customers have.
- It can’t be handed to an insurer, a lender or a large customer as evidence you’re a real business.
Search is the thing you’re missing#
Roughly speaking there are two ways a stranger finds a small business. They’re shown you, or they go looking for you. Social media is the first. Google is the second, and the second one arrives with money already in hand, because nobody types "emergency locksmith Dayton" for entertainment.
You don’t need a website to appear in Google’s map results, which is a separate free listing and the fastest win available to a local business. But the map listing links somewhere, and Google reads that somewhere to decide how seriously to take you. Our guide to getting on the first page of Google covers how the two fit together.
What you don’t own#
This is the argument owners dismiss until it happens to them. Your page is on someone else’s land. It can be restricted, mistakenly flagged, hacked through a compromised personal account, or lost when the person who set it up in 2017 leaves. There’s no phone number to call, only a web form.
We have picked up the pieces for a caterer who lost eleven years of photographs and every customer conversation in a single afternoon. The rebuild took two weeks. What she couldn’t rebuild was the messages, because there was no copy anywhere else. A mailbox on your own domain and a site you control means the worst version of that day is annoying rather than fatal.
Do I need a website if I have Facebook and I only sell locally?#
Local is exactly where the website earns its keep, which surprises people. Local searches are the ones with a town in them, and a town search is the easiest kind of search to win. A national brand can’t outrank you for "sourdough Asheville" if you have a page about sourdough that mentions Asheville, because they have nothing to say about Asheville.
| What the customer wants | Facebook and Instagram | Your own site |
|---|---|---|
| Find you by searching a service and a town | Rarely | Yes, that’s the point |
| See today’s prices | Buried in an old post | One page, always current |
| Send an inquiry without an account | No | Yes |
| See recent work and reactions to it | Excellent | Fine, less lively |
| Be reminded you exist on a Tuesday | Excellent | No |
| Pay a deposit | Awkward | Yes |
What social does better, and you should keep doing#
Don’t read this as an argument for deleting anything. Instagram is the best free store window ever built for anyone whose work photographs well. Facebook groups still sell more cakes in a small town than any ad. Nothing on a website will ever match a reel of you installing a wood stove for reminding four hundred people that you exist.
The right arrangement uses both. Social makes people aware of you and warms them up. The website converts the ones who are ready, holds the boring facts, and catches everybody who came from Google instead.
It also helps to notice which of the two you enjoy. Plenty of owners keep a website because they were told to and let it go stale while they happily post four times a week. That’s a perfectly good arrangement, as long as the stale website still has this year’s prices on it. A site is a thing you correct twice a year instead of feeding, which is why it suits people who dislike posting.
How to run both without doubling the work#
- Put your website address in the Instagram bio link and in the Facebook page button. Change the button from Message to Book Now or Learn More.
- Write the boring facts once, on the site: prices, areas, hours, what you don’t do.
- When someone asks in a comment, answer briefly and link the page. You’ll use the same three links most weeks.
- Reuse the photographs. What you post on Instagram on Monday goes on the site’s gallery on Friday. It’s the same fifteen minutes.
- Send people from the site to social, too. A recent grid on your own page is proof you’re still in business.
What it costs to run both#
An Asheville baker we work with was taking orders entirely through Instagram messages. She was spending, by her estimate, six hours a week answering the same four questions and had lost track of two orders in a month. She went live on January 12 with five pages: prices, order form, pickup times, allergens and about.
The arithmetic was small. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. That one monthly bill carries the mailbox and the backups instead of leaving those to arrive separately from three other companies. The .com is included on the Complete plan at $18.99 a month. On Basic at $8.99 a month the name is registered in your own name and run for you, and the registry’s own annual fee for it, about $12 a year, is billed separately at cost. In February she took nineteen orders through the form. The messages didn’t stop, but they became messages about cake rather than messages about whether she does gluten free, because that is now written down. Getting the form right matters here: five fields, not fifteen, as covered in the inquiry form piece.
When the answer is no#
If you’re fully booked for the next four months, sell everything you make at one farmers market booth, and have no intention of growing, don’t spend the money or the evening. Put your prices in a pinned post, keep the messages tidy, and get on with it. A website is a tool for being found by people who don’t know you yet. If you don’t want more of those people, you don’t need the tool.
For everybody else, the practical version is small: five pages, well written, live in a week. What goes on them is in what to put on your homepage, and the build itself is our small business website. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. There’s no contract, so if it turns out you didn’t need it you stop paying and keep the domain.
Questions people ask about this
Do I need a website if I have a Facebook business page?
If people find you by searching Google rather than by scrolling, yes. A Facebook page is very hard to rank for searches like "dog groomer Tacoma", and it can’t hold your prices, your service pages or a proper inquiry form. If your customers all come from a small town Facebook group and you’re fully booked, a page on its own is fine for now.
Can a Facebook page show up on Google?
Sometimes, usually only when someone searches your business name. For the searches that bring new customers, the ones with a service and a town in them, Google almost always shows business websites and Google Business Profiles instead. That’s the gap a website fills.
What happens if my Facebook account gets hacked or disabled?
You lose the page, the messages, the photographs and the followers at the same time, and there’s no phone number to call. Recovery is a web form and a wait. This is the strongest practical argument for having a website and a mailbox on your own domain, because those can’t be taken away by someone else’s moderation system.
Is it worth having a website if I only get five inquiries a month?
Probably yes, because the site tends to change the quality of those five inquiries as well as the number. People arrive already knowing your prices, your area and what you do, so fewer of them are wasting your time. $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting today, then $8.99 a month until you cancel. That’s a cost every website carries whoever built it, and it doesn’t take many won jobs to cover it.
While you are here
Reading about it is the slow way.
We design the website, write the words and put it online in seven days. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. The same build is openly sold at $1,500, which is what a US agency charges for a small business site of this size. The hosting carries a mailbox, SSL, and the DNS and renewals on your own domain. Domain included on Complete, $18.99 a month. On Basic it’s billed at cost, about $12 a year. No contract and no notice period.