Sometimes the honest answer is no. If you are fully booked from word of mouth, have no intention of growing, and your customers all find you the same way, a well kept Facebook page and a Google listing may genuinely be enough. Nobody needs a website as a matter of principle.
Here is how to tell whether you are in that group, and what it costs if you are not.
The three ways a social page costs you
1. You are invisible to the search that matters. People looking for a service in your area search for the service, not for you. A Facebook page competes badly for “emergency plumber Scarborough” against businesses with a page written about emergency plumbing in Scarborough. Your page is designed to be found by people who already know your name.
2. You do not own it. Your page, your followers and your reach belong to a company that can change the rules, and does. Accounts get restricted by automated systems with no useful appeal. If your entire presence is one login, you are one bad morning from having no presence at all.
3. It cannot answer questions. The most common reason a local business gets a phone call is hours, parking, price, or whether you do the specific thing. Every one of those calls is somebody who nearly gave up. A page that answers them turns a call into a booking.
The test
Answer these honestly.
- Do people search for what you do, rather than who you are? If yes, you need pages about what you do.
- Do you get calls asking things a page could answer? Every one is a customer who did not find it.
- Would losing your account tomorrow hurt? If yes, you have built on rented ground.
- Do you need to be found outside your existing circle? Word of mouth has a ceiling and it is lower than most owners think.
Two or more yes answers and a site pays for itself. Zero, and you should keep your money, which is genuinely the right answer for some businesses.
What “enough” looks like
If you do need one, it is smaller than you fear. For most local businesses:
- Who you are and what you sell, in a sentence a stranger understands
- Your services, with prices if you can bear it
- Where you are, or where you go
- Hours
- A tappable phone number and a form that arrives
- The five questions you are sick of answering
That is one page. It costs less than a month of ads and it works at 11pm.
Keep the Facebook page
None of this is an argument against social. Keep posting. The difference is what each thing is for: the page is where people who know you keep up, the site is where people who do not know you decide.
They also feed each other. A link in your bio that leads somewhere real converts better than one that leads to a phone number and hope.
The honest cost
I build these. A Starter Website is $700 and is live in about a week; the full price list is public. But the useful thing I can do first is tell you whether you need one.
Send me your business name. If a website is not what your business needs right now, I will say so, and that is not a sales technique, it is that a site sold to someone who did not need it does not get referred.