Everyone who answers this question sells websites

Start with what is already working, because the sales pitch for a website usually skips it.

A profile does discovery better than a website ever will. Somebody who has never heard of you sees your work in a feed. No website gets that. A site is a place people arrive at, and arriving requires already knowing the name.

It also does proof. A year of posts is evidence that you turn up, that the work is consistent, and that other people respond to it. A page of testimonials is a claim. A feed is a record.

And it does messaging. Somebody can ask a question in two taps and get an answer, which is a lower-friction path than any contact form.

For a business whose customers are already on the platform and whose work is visual, that trio covers most of the job. A hairdresser, a cake maker, a tattoo artist, a personal trainer. If that is you, the honest answer to this question might be not yet.

Three places, and they are specific rather than general.

The first is the transaction. A profile can take an enquiry. It cannot take a deposit, hold a slot, or sell a thing at two in the morning while you sleep. Every step you make somebody do by message is a step some of them will not take.

The second is the question a feed cannot answer. What it costs. Whether you cover their area. What happens if it goes wrong. People scrolling back through forty posts looking for your prices are people deciding not to bother.

The third is ownership, and it is the one every website seller leads with. The argument is sound and it is also overstated. Accounts do get suspended and reach does get throttled. It is rarer than the people quoting it imply, and the real version is narrower. You do not own the list. You cannot export your followers. If the account goes, the relationship goes with it, and an email list is the actual fix for that rather than a website.

Here is the thing that actually moved, and most of the pages answering this question were written before it did.

BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey found that use of ChatGPT and similar tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a single year, making it the third most popular way people find a local business. Not a projection. A measured jump in twelve months.

That changes the argument from taste to plumbing. The old case for a website was that it looked more professional, which was always a bit soft. The new case is that something is now reading the web on a customer's behalf and summarising what it finds, and it cannot read your Instagram. It reads pages.

So the question stops being whether a human will visit your site and becomes whether a machine can find anything to say about you. Those are different questions and the second one is harder to shrug off.

The honest half, and it is a big one. A Google Business Profile is also a page, it is also machine readable, and it is free. So this argues for being readable, not necessarily for buying a website. Which is the next section, and it is the one the other guides skip.

A Google Business Profile is a real, indexed, machine-readable page about your business that costs nothing. For a local business it does most of what a brochure site does, and it does one thing no website can, which is appear in the map pack.

It carries hours, location, phone, photos, services, a description, and reviews. Reviews are the part that matters, because they are the thing a website structurally cannot have and the thing people actually read.

Most businesses set one up, never finish it, and never touch it again. An unfinished profile with four photos from 2021 and no reply to any review is doing a fraction of its job. Google publishes its own guidelines for what belongs on one, and they are worth twenty minutes.

If you have not finished your Google Business Profile, buying a website is solving the wrong problem. The free thing that already appears in the results is half empty, and the paid thing you are about to buy will rank below it for years.

The question is usually framed as website or no website, and that framing is doing a lot of damage. The useful middle is a single page.

One page that says what you do, what it costs, who it is for, and has a button that books or buys. No blog, no about page, no five-item navigation that nobody uses. It answers the questions a feed cannot and it gives the machines something to read.

That is a far smaller job than a website. Ours are $399 against $2,500 for a full site, and the gap is not quality, it is scope. A single page you actually finish beats a six-page site you abandon half built, and abandoned half-built sites are extremely common.

Build the bigger thing when you have a reason you can name. Several services that each need explaining. A booking system. Something to sell. A real need for the pages, rather than a feeling that a proper business has them.

Four cases, and we would turn the work down in all of them.

You are full. A diary with no gaps does not have a marketing problem. Buying a website to generate demand you cannot serve is spending money to make your own life harder. Come back when there is a gap.

All your work comes by referral. If every customer arrives because somebody told them about you, your growth lever is that referral loop and not a page. Ask for the review, make the introduction easy, and leave the site until the loop stops feeding you.

You are testing whether the business works. If you are three months in and still deciding what you sell and to whom, a website locks in answers you have not reached. It will be wrong by the time it is finished. A profile and a phone number can carry you through that stage, and they can change on a Tuesday.

Nobody will maintain it. A site with last year's prices and a closed location on it is actively costing you. If there is no one to update it, the honest answer is to keep the thing that updates itself, which is the profile you post to anyway.

That last one is the common one, and it is why so many small business sites are three years stale. The build is the cheap part. Keeping it true is the cost nobody quotes for.

There is a fifth case that is less a rule than a warning. If the reason you want a website is that a competitor has one, stop. That is not a reason, it is a feeling, and it produces the sites that get built and abandoned. A competitor's site might be bringing them nothing. You cannot tell from outside, and neither can they without looking.

The useful test is to name the customer. One real person, the kind you actually want more of, and the moment in their week when they would need a page. If you can describe that moment, build the page for it. If the description comes out vague, the page will come out vague too, and vague pages are the ones nobody updates.

Shorter than you think. The failure mode is not too little, it is a site with eleven pages and nothing on any of them.

What you do, in a sentence somebody could repeat. What it costs, or at least a starting figure. Who it is for, which usually means naming who it is not for. Proof, meaning reviews or work rather than adjectives. And one action, repeated, that is the only thing you want anybody to do.

Price is the one most businesses leave off and it is the one most visitors came for. A page with no price sends people back to the search results to find somebody who shows one. We publish ours, including on this site, and it is not a brave decision, it is just answering the question.

Then connect it to the feed properly. The profile link goes to the page, not the homepage, and the page carries the same work the feed shows. If you want the long version of making those two agree, we wrote one for restaurants and most of it applies to anybody.