A florist in a market town runs her entire business from an Instagram grid. It looks good, it has four thousand followers, and this week she has answered the same direct message nine times: "do you deliver to the village?" The answer exists only in her thumbs, because there is no page for it to live on.
That is the real question behind "do I still need a website". Not whether social media works, because it plainly does, but whether a grid can carry all the jobs a business needs doing.
What a social profile is genuinely good at
- Discovery by browsing. Nobody opens Instagram meaning to find a plumber. Plenty of people find a cake maker by scrolling, and no website has ever matched that.
- Proof you are alive. A profile that posted this week says more about a small business than any About page.
- Personality and pace. Twenty seconds of a workshop, a delivery van in the snow, a sold-out sign. This is not what pages are for.
If your customers find you by browsing and buy by messaging, a profile is doing real work. Keep it.
What it cannot do, however good it looks
- Be found by someone searching. People search for a service and a place: "wedding florist Preston". Search engines answer that with pages, and a profile is one page for your whole business. If nobody can search their way to you, you are relying on being scrolled past at the right moment.
- Answer at eleven at night. Delivery areas, opening hours, what you charge to travel, whether you do funeral work. Every one of those is a message you answer personally, forever, or a page you write once.
- Finish a sale. A conversation that ends in "DM me for prices" loses the people who did not want a conversation. Some customers want to book, pay and go without speaking to anyone.
- Belong to you. Accounts get locked, reach gets changed, and neither event comes with a warning or an appeal you can rely on. Everything you built sits behind someone else's decision.
- Hold a list. Followers are borrowed. An email list is yours, and it is the only audience you can reach without asking permission. Our guide to email marketing for beginners is a reasonable place to start.
Three questions that settle it
- Do people search for what you sell? Type your trade and your town into a search engine. If the results are businesses like yours, that traffic exists and you cannot reach it from a profile.
- Does a sale need more than a message? If you take bookings, deposits, orders or enquiries with details attached, you need somewhere those can complete without you.
- What happens if the account goes tomorrow? If the honest answer is "the business stops", the account is not a marketing channel, it is a single point of failure.
Two yeses is enough. Three means you are already overdue.
What to build, which is less than you think
Not a big site. Most owner-run businesses need five pages: what you do, what it costs or how pricing works, proof that other people were happy, how to reach you, and one page for the thing you most want people to do. Our list of small business website essentials covers the detail.
Then do the two things a profile cannot. Put your opening hours, address and service area on the site in a form search engines read, which is what local SEO for a one-location business is about. And collect reviews somewhere you control, not just where the algorithm shows them.
You can have the first version live before you have finished deciding what to call it. Our free website builder will publish a real site from a design, and you can change every word afterwards.
Then make them point at each other
The profile is the shop window and the site is the shop. Put the link in the bio and actually use it. Answer a repeated question once on a page, then reply to the tenth message with that link. Post the thing, and let the page hold the detail.
The businesses that do best with social media are rarely the ones with the most followers. They are the ones where the follower can become a customer without a conversation.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a website if I already have a Facebook or Instagram page?
Yes, if any of three things are true: people search for what you sell, a sale needs more than a message, or losing the account tomorrow would stop the business. A profile cannot be found by someone searching, cannot complete a booking at eleven at night, and does not belong to you.
Is a website better than social media for a small business?
Neither is better, because they do different jobs. Social media is good at discovery by browsing and at proving you are active. A website is good at being found by search, answering questions without you, completing a sale, and holding an email list you own.
What pages does a small business website actually need?
Five is usually enough: what you do, what it costs or how pricing works, proof that other people were happy, how to reach you, and one page for the single thing you most want a visitor to do.