Do I need a website for my small business, or is a Google or Facebook page enough?

Is a Google Business Profile enough on its own?

For some businesses, yes, at least for now. A Business Profile is a listing: your hours, photos, services, and reviews, shown when someone searches your name or your category nearby. Google’s help page on local ranking names relevance, distance and prominence as the main factors, and a complete, active profile is built to compete on exactly those. That covers a lot of ground for a business that mostly gets found by people already looking for it.

What does a website do that a Facebook page cannot?

You own it. A profile on Google or Facebook lives on someone else’s platform, under their rules, and it can change layout, features, or visibility on their schedule, not yours. A website is where you decide what a visitor sees first, how a booking form works, what a landing page for a specific service says, and how the whole thing looks when you run an ad to it. It’s also the one place every other channel (your profile, your social posts, your reviews) can point back to that you control end to end.

Does Google still let me build a website inside my profile?

No. A Business Profile gives you a listing: no domain of your own, no say over layout beyond the fields Google provides, and nothing to point an ad at. Treat it as the sign over your door.

Who can honestly skip a website for now?

A one-person trade whose calendar is already full from referrals and repeat work can run on a complete, active Google Business Profile for a while. If you’re turning work down, a website won’t change that this month. The day you want strangers finding you in search, bookings or payments taken online, somewhere to send ad traffic, or an accurate answer when someone asks ChatGPT about you, the profile stops being enough. None of that runs on a profile alone.

Somewhere in between? The website design page shows what a build includes and how it connects to what you already have on Google. We run this site the same way, as our own first client.