"We have a Facebook page, do we really need a website too?" It is a question heard constantly, in pitches, in forums, in comment sections across the internet. The people asking it are not naive. They see other businesses managing on Facebook alone and wonder if they can do the same. What is striking is that two entirely separate bodies of evidence, one drawn from researchers and practitioners, one drawn from the conversations of ordinary business owners, arrive at exactly the same conclusion.
Part one
What the experts and research say
The data here comes from search behaviour research, digital marketing practitioners, and platform analysts. These are people whose job it is to understand how customers actually find and choose businesses online. Their case against Facebook-only is structural and numbers-driven.
Expert evidence 01
Nine out of ten customers search on Google first, and Google does not return Facebook pages
Research consistently shows that 9 in 10 consumers turn to a search engine before purchasing goods or services. They do not open Facebook and browse. They type a need into Google. And when they do, what appears in the results are websites, not Facebook pages.
A Facebook page ranks poorly in Google's search results for anything that is not a direct brand name search. Someone looking for a painter, a plumber, or a dog trainer in their area will find whoever has a website optimised for that search. The businesses without one are simply invisible to the most motivated customers, the ones actively looking to buy right now.
97% | 46% | 88% |
of people search online to find local businesses | of all Google searches are people looking for local businesses | of mobile searchers contact or visit a business within 24 hours |
These are not marginal numbers. They describe the primary way customers find and choose businesses. Without a small business website, a business is absent from that entire process.
Expert evidence 02
Most of your followers never see your posts, and Facebook controls who does
When Facebook introduced business pages, it created the impression that publishing a post meant your followers would see it. That has never been true, and it has only become less true over time. Research by Ogilvy found that only 2–6% of a page's followers see any given post. More recent estimates put organic reach for business pages at 5–10% at best.
"When algorithms change, reach can fall dramatically. A post that once reached thousands can suddenly reach only a hundred."
— From the source material on Facebook algorithm dependency
This is not a bug; it is Facebook's business model. Reduced organic reach creates pressure to pay for advertising. The business owner who believed their Facebook page was their marketing channel is, in practice, renting an audience from a platform that has every incentive to make that rental more expensive over time. A website has no algorithm between the business and the visitor.
Expert evidence 03
You do not own your Facebook page, and that is a serious business risk
A Facebook page is not your property. It is a page on a platform you borrow from someone else. Facebook can change its rules at any time, alter what your page looks like, restrict what you are allowed to post, reduce who sees your content, or, in the event of a hack or policy violation, close the account entirely. When that happens, everything built there disappears.
Platform dependency risk
A website with your own domain is different in kind, not just degree. The domain is yours. The content is yours. The structure, the branding, the contact forms, the booking systems, all of it sits on infrastructure you control. No external platform can alter it, restrict it, or take it away. A Facebook page is a temporary bulletin board borrowed from a platform you do not own. A website is your base.
Expert evidence 04
AI search is making the gap wider, not smaller
The arrival of AI-powered search tools, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI overviews, has introduced a new dimension to this argument. These tools retrieve and synthesise information from websites. They read structure, text, and data. Facebook pages, with their feeds of posts and comments, are largely unreadable by these systems.
As AI takes up more space in how people search for products and services, the businesses with well-structured websites gain a presence in those answers. The businesses with only a Facebook page gain nothing. The gap between the two is growing, not shrinking.
Expert evidence 05
A Facebook page cannot answer questions, build trust, or convert customers the way a website can
Consider what a customer needs before they decide to hire someone or make a purchase: a clear description of services, evidence of past work, answers to common questions, pricing information, reviews from previous customers, and a simple way to make contact. A website can organise all of this so it is available to anyone, at any hour, in precisely the order that helps them decide.
A Facebook page cannot do this well. Information is buried in a feed that requires scrolling back through months of posts. The visual identity is constrained by what Facebook allows. There is no place to build out detailed service pages, a proper FAQ, or a portfolio. And critically, someone who finds the business at 11pm on a Sunday cannot fill in a contact form and leave a query for the morning, they can only send a message and wait, which means they often move on to whoever makes it easier.
The professional impression matters too. When a potential customer searches for a business and finds only a Facebook page, with its mix of posts, comments, and whatever Facebook decides to display around it, it does not signal seriousness. A clean, well-designed website signals that the business takes itself seriously. That first impression shapes whether the customer continues or leaves.
Part two
What real people in forums and communities say
The research above tells you what the data shows. But there is a second body of evidence that is, in some ways, more persuasive: the conversations that ordinary business owners, customers, and practitioners have with each other when no one is trying to sell them anything. These are forum threads, comment sections, and community discussions. They were not written to make a case. They make it anyway.
Forum evidence 01
The business owners who rely only on Facebook are the ones other people complain about
One of the most upvoted threads on the topic is not about building a Facebook strategy, it is titled "Businesses whose 'websites' are actually Facebook pages" and carries over 1,000 upvotes. That signal matters. When a business substitutes its Facebook page for a website, the people trying to find it notice, and they are annoyed, not impressed.
Another thread asks directly: "Do small businesses even need websites nowadays?" It generates dozens of comments. The fact that the question keeps surfacing across communities and years tells you the answer Facebook provides is incomplete. Incomplete means risky. A website resolves it.
Forum evidence 02
Facebook's own algorithm punishes the strategy of chasing likes
A social media professional with several hundred Facebook campaigns behind him makes a precise, data-grounded argument in a small business forum. The logic runs as follows: if you accumulate 1,000 likes from people who are not genuinely interested in your content, Facebook's EdgeRank will show your posts to only 6–12% of them. If you instead cultivate 200 relevant followers, up to 50% will see each post.
"If you only care about the number of likes, you might as well buy 40,000 followers, but do they have any value for your business?"
— Social media professional, small business forum
The implication is structural: Facebook is not a neutral distribution channel you control. It is a platform that decides, based on its own commercial interests, who sees what. A website has no EdgeRank. Every visitor who arrives sees exactly what you chose to publish.
Forum evidence 03
The same professionals telling you to use Facebook are also telling you to point it at a website
Read the forum advice carefully. Not a single social media professional in any of these conversations argues that Facebook replaces a website. Every one of them describes a two-part system. The flow works in both directions: Facebook posts link to website content, and website pages carry like-buttons and follow-boxes that send visitors back to Facebook. Neither can "stand alone."
The advice to add a Like Box plugin to a site, to embed like-buttons on individual pages, to use Facebook apps as tabs that surface homepage content, all of this assumes a website already exists. Facebook is described throughout as a traffic source and an engagement layer, never as a destination in itself.
Forum evidence 04
The same question keeps being asked, which means Facebook keeps failing to answer it
Across communities and years, the same question recurs in slightly different forms: "Is a good website still worth it, or do most people just run off socials now?" (47 comments). "Do you think a website is still necessary for small businesses today?" (114 comments). "What can a website do for a small or local business that a Facebook page can't?" (123 comments).
The sheer volume of responses to that last question suggests people have a great deal to say, and that "just use Facebook" is not among the answers. If a Facebook page were genuinely sufficient, the question would stop being asked. It has not stopped.
Forum evidence 05
Facebook is structurally unsuited to be the only presence of a serious business
The source conversations include threads about Meta quietly pushing face-recognition code to millions of phones without announcement, users actively searching for alternatives to Facebook with hundreds of upvotes and hundreds of comments, and widespread discussion of the platform's relationship with its own user base eroding over time.
A business that has built its entire online presence on a platform that its own users are trying to exit has built on sand. A website is owned infrastructure. The domain is yours. The content is yours. The contact forms, the booking systems, the product listings, none of it can be altered by a policy change at a platform you do not control.
Platform dependency risk
Business owners arguing that Facebook is "easy to manage" and that customers can find all their information there are describing a convenience that belongs to them only as long as Facebook allows it. That is a different thing from owning a digital presence.
Two different sources. The same conclusion.
What is remarkable about this case is not that experts say you need a website, of course they do. What is remarkable is that the people asking the question in good faith, in their own forums and comment sections, without anyone trying to sell them anything, arrive at exactly the same place.
The research shows that customers search on Google, not Facebook, and that Facebook's algorithm ensures most followers never see posts anyway. The forums show that businesses without websites irritate customers, that every professional practitioner assumes a website exists, and that the question of whether a website is necessary keeps generating hundreds of responses because Facebook keeps failing to make it unnecessary.
A Facebook page is a useful tool for reaching people where they already spend time. A website is the place you actually own. The question was never either/or, but if forced to choose one as the foundation, both the data and the crowd point only one way.
