Does your small business need a website? An honest answer.

The honest answer first

Some businesses manage without a website, at least for a while, and do fine. A mobile dog groomer booked weeks ahead through referrals. A plasterer with a waiting list who never advertises. A market stall. Someone testing whether a new idea has customers at all. They live on a Google Business Profile, an Instagram or Facebook page, WhatsApp and word of mouth, and they are busy.

If that is you, you do not need a website this month. What you need is to know what you are giving up, and to protect what you have, because everything you rely on belongs to someone else.

You do need a website once one of these is true:

• You want to run ads, or you already pay for them.
• You want strangers to find you for searches beyond the map, such as a particular service in your town.
• Customers keep phoning with the same questions before they book.
• You need a privacy notice, an online booking route or a way to take payments.
• Losing your social media account would cut you off from your customers.
• You want an email address on your own domain rather than a free one.

A business that wants to grow usually hits one of these sooner or later. The rest of this guide is about which gaps matter for yours, and how small the fix can be.

What a Business Profile does well, and where it stops

A Google Business Profile puts you on Google Maps and in local search results, with your hours, phone number, photos, reviews and a button to call or get directions. It is free, and some customers decide from it alone without visiting any website. Every local business should have one, website or not.

Where it stops:

• You fill in Google's fields, in Google's layout, with little room to explain what you do, what it costs or how a first visit works.
• The public can suggest edits to your details, and Google can accept them.
• Google decides what the profile shows and changes it when it likes.
• It cannot hold a privacy notice, a detailed answer to a common question or a page for each service.

Google used to offer free websites built from Business Profiles, and switched them off in 2024. For a few months their visitors were sent to the profile, and after that the old addresses stopped working. Businesses that relied on them had to start again. A free page on someone else's platform lasts as long as the platform wants it to.

What a social media page does well, and where it stops

Instagram and Facebook are good for showing recent work, posting updates and answering messages, and many customers will message you there before they would ever fill in a form. Keep them.

Where they stop:

• Posts sink. The answer to "do you cover Leeds?" is buried under last month's photos.
• Followers are not a list you own. You cannot take them with you or contact them outside the platform.
• Meta's terms let it suspend or permanently disable an account it judges to have broken its rules, and the way back is its own review process.
• A business page is run through personal accounts. If the only admin's account is hacked or disabled, the business loses its way in.
• What people see depends on the platform, the post and whether they are logged in.

Stay on them, and treat a social page as a shop window in someone else's building: make sure you also have a door of your own.

Booking apps and listing sites

Many businesses also sell through someone else's marketplace: a salon on a booking app's directory, a guesthouse on a booking site, a maker on Etsy, a tradesperson on a lead site. These bring customers you would never have reached alone, and for a new business they can be the fastest start.

The terms are theirs. They usually take a fee on each booking or lead, they set the rules for reviews and messages, and the customer's account is with them, not with you. Some show competitors on the same page as you. A listing can be paused or removed under their rules, and the customers who found you there go with it.

Keep the listings that pay. Then give repeat customers a direct way back to you: your own domain, a page with your booking link or form, and a card in the bag or the room that points to it. A guesthouse whose returning guests book direct keeps the fee and the relationship.

What you give up without a website

These are the gaps owners run into, roughly in the order they hurt:

• A place for ad clicks. Most Google Ads campaigns send people to a page on a website. Meta ads can open a lead form or a chat instead, but Meta's lead forms ask for a link to your privacy policy, which needs somewhere to live.
• Searches beyond the map. A profile shows up when Google treats a search as local. Pages on a website can show up for the services, questions and areas people search for in their own words.
• Answers in your words. Prices or what decides them, the area you cover, what happens at a first appointment, what to bring. Written once, they save the same phone call every week.
• Your own email address. An address on your own domain looks like a business, and it lets booking confirmations and quotes pass the checks that keep them out of spam: see why your business emails go to spam.
• Contacts you control. An enquiry through your own form lands in your inbox, with the details you asked for, instead of in a platform's message thread.
• A place to send people when a friend recommends you and they want to check you are real.

Three businesses, three answers

A mobile dog groomer, booked a month ahead, with a Business Profile full of reviews and an Instagram of happy dogs. She does not need a website yet. She should buy her domain name, set up an email address on it, add a second admin to her Instagram and write down the five questions new customers always ask. When she wants to raise prices or take on a second groomer, a one-page site comes next.

A two-van plumbing firm that wants to run Google Ads for boiler repairs. It needs a page for the ads now, with the offer, the area covered, a tappable phone number and a short form, as landing pages for ads describes. Paying for clicks that land on a profile or a social page wastes most of them. A trade business like this one is covered in more detail on home services.

A new physiotherapy clinic using online booking software. The booking tool gives it a booking page, but nowhere to explain each treatment, introduce the physios or publish a privacy notice that covers the intake form. It needs a small site around the booking tool from the start.

The smallest website that fixes it

If the gaps above matter to you, the fix does not have to be big. A single page, or a handful, on your own domain covers most of them:

• What you do and where, in the first line, in the words customers search with.
• How to get in touch: a phone number that starts a call when tapped, a short form and your hours.
• Prices, or what decides the price and how a quote works.
• Photos of your real work and a link to your Google reviews.
• The area you cover, if you go to customers.
• A separate privacy notice that matches what the form collects.
• Links to your Business Profile and social pages, and links from them back to the site.

Keep the profile and the social pages going, and link them to the site. The site is the one place in the set that you own, and the one the others can all point to.

When the business grows, add a page per main service. The full list of what a business site needs, page by page, is in what a small business website needs.

Build it yourself, or pay someone

A website builder can do the small site well if you have a free weekend, are happy writing about your business and can take decent photos on a phone. The builder handles hosting and updates, and you keep the domain in your name. How the main builders compare is in Wix, Squarespace or WordPress, and what AI tools can and cannot do for you here is in can AI build your business website.

Paying someone makes sense when time is what you lack, when the site has to connect to your booking tool or CRM, when you are about to spend money on ads, or when a template would make you look like every competitor using it. What changes the price is explained in what decides the price of a website.

Either way, avoid the big site you cannot keep up. A small site whose prices and hours are right beats a large one that was last touched two years ago.

If you do without for now, protect what you have

Running a business on other people's platforms is fine as long as one bad day cannot wipe you out. Do these this week, whatever you decide about a website:

• Buy your domain name now, in the business's name, set to renew automatically. It costs little, and nobody else can take it.
• Set up an email address on the domain and start using it for customers.
• Make sure your Business Profile is owned by a Google account the business controls, with a second owner or manager added.
• Add a second admin to your Facebook and Instagram pages, and switch on two-step verification for every admin.
• Keep your customers' contact details, with their permission, in your booking tool or a spreadsheet you own. A message thread is not a customer list.
• Keep your own copies of your best photos.

The domain is the one step not to put off. A domain you own can point at a one-page site next month and keep every email address working for years. A good name lost to someone else is gone.

What it costs to have one, and not to

Having a website costs a yearly domain renewal, hosting or a builder plan, and someone's time to keep the facts on it right. A studio build adds the design and build itself, and a monthly plan if you want someone else to look after it.

Not having one costs things you never see: the stranger who checked you out, found only a social page and booked someone else; the ad click that landed nowhere useful; the customer who wanted to know your prices at 10pm. None of it shows up in your figures, which is why it is easy to wait too long.

There is no rule that says when the second cost becomes bigger than the first. A useful test: if you could name three enquiries you lost last month because a customer could not find something out without phoning, a small site is likely to be worth its keep.

Where to start

If you decide you need one, start with the smallest version that fixes your biggest gap, and add pages when there is something specific to say. Most businesses we talk to start with the website and add the rest once it pays for itself, and the consultation is there to find the smallest thing that fixes what keeps slipping through.

A website from us includes the pages written with you, the search setup, your Google Business Profile set up or tidied, a form that lands in your inbox and the domain, hosting and accounts in your name: see websites, and the prices page for what each part costs.