Do you need a website if you already have a Facebook or Instagram page?
Most local businesses that have a Facebook or Instagram page still need a website. The page reaches people who already follow you. A website is what a stranger finds when they search Google, it sits at an address you own, and it keeps your prices and booking in one place. With us a one-page site starts from £450, before VAT.
Take a café with a lively Instagram account. Regulars see the morning's cakes and leave comments under them. A couple who moved to the area last month type "brunch in Hove" into Google, and the screen fills with a map and other cafés' profiles. A social page can turn up in those results, but it was made for people who follow it, and anyone without an account soon meets a request to log in.
The second gap shows up in the owner's messages. On a social page the prices sit in a post from March and the hours in a highlight nobody taps, so people ask instead: how much is a brow tint, and is there anything free on Saturday? Each answer takes a few minutes of an evening. Multiply that by a busy week and the owner is running a help desk from the sofa.
Elin Skin & Brow, a beauty studio in Amsterdam, shows what a website does about that. We built its site around one table that gives every treatment with its minutes and its price, and one button to book. By the figures on its case study, twice as many appointments now arrive without a message first. Clients settle the price on the page before they think of opening a chat.
Then there is the question of who owns what. A Facebook page lives on Meta's platform, under Meta's rules, and it belongs in practice to whoever controls the login. We meet trades firms whose page was set up by a former employee or a nephew, and when that account is locked or hacked, the owner loses the page along with years of recommendations on it. A website sits on a domain registered in your name, at £10 a year. With us the domain, the content and the code are yours from day one.
A social page on its own is enough for some businesses, for a while. A market stall or a pop-up kitchen trades on where it will be this weekend, and posts suit that far better than pages that go stale by Friday. A business in its first few months, still finding out whether people want what it makes, can wait too. And if every job comes from people who already know you and you are turning work away, spend the money on something else first.
When the time comes, the first site can be small. A landing page from £450 gives a stranger your prices and hours, with a button to book or get in touch, and it links to the Instagram you already keep up. A business with several services worth a page each fits our Starter website, from £800 for up to five pages. Hosting costs £10 a month on top.
Starting prices, UK, before VAT
Landing page
from£450
One page, one action. For a single offer, a launch, or an ad campaign.
Starter website
from£800
Up to 5 pages. The essentials, built to bring in enquiries.
Our rule of thumb is to keep the social page for the people who already know you and build the website for the ones who do not yet. Send us a link to your page and tell us how enquiries reach you now, and we will say whether a one-page site would earn its cost or whether the page will do for another season.
Written by Maksym Gavrylenko · Published