Do I need a website if I have a Facebook page?

Short answer: yes — and the two work best together. A Facebook or Instagram page is a brilliant way to reach people. But on its own it quietly costs you customers: you don't own it, you're hard to find on Google through it, and it doesn't build the same trust as your own website. The winning setup for a small business isn't social or a website — it's both, pointing at each other.

Social media is rented land. Your website is land you own.

Your Facebook or Instagram following lives on someone else's platform, under someone else's rules. The algorithm decides how many of your followers actually see a post (often a small fraction). Reach gets throttled, features change, and accounts get locked or hacked — and if that happens, the audience you spent years building can vanish overnight. A website is the one place online that's yours: nobody can switch it off, bury it, or change the rules on you.

Customers Google you before they decide

Before booking, buying or visiting, a lot of people search your business name — or your service plus their town ("electrician Monaghan", "nail salon Carrickmacross"). If nothing professional comes up, two things happen: you look less established, and you simply don't appear for the people actively looking to spend money. A Facebook page rarely ranks for those searches; a proper website, set up for local search, can.

What a website does that a Facebook page can't

• Gets you found on Google — including local "near me" and "[service] [town]" searches, and on Google Maps.
• You control the story — your services, your prices, your photos, laid out exactly how you want, with no distractions or competitors' ads beside you.
• Works 24/7 — take bookings, enquiries or online orders while you sleep, instead of trading DMs back and forth.
• Builds trust fast — a clean, quick site signals you're a real, established business worth dealing with.
• Loads instantly on phones — where most of your customers are browsing.

"But I get all my business from Facebook!"

Brilliant — keep doing exactly that. A website doesn't replace what's working; it amplifies it. Link your social profiles to your site and your site to your socials, and each one feeds the other: social brings people in, the website turns them into bookings and sales and catches the ones who'd never have found you on Facebook at all. You're not choosing between them — you're closing the gaps.

You don't need an expensive site to start

This is the part people get wrong: you don't need a huge, costly build. A simple, well-made starter site is plenty to begin with, and you can grow it later. If you're curious what that costs, we wrote it all out plainly in how much a website costs in Ireland — and there's a government grant, the Trading Online Voucher, that can cover up to €2,500 of getting online.

If you'd like a hand, tell us about your business and we'll come back within one working day with a plan and a price — no jargon, no pressure.

Frequently asked questions