What customers do before they call
Picture a driver in Hayward with a flat tire at 7:40 in the morning. She searches on her phone. She is not scrolling for fun. She wants to know if you are open, where you are, and if you can take her now. BrightLocal surveyed 1,227 US consumers in 2026 who had searched for a local business in the last three months. They made their choice in under 30 minutes, from a short list.
What do they look at? A Chatmeter roundup of review research found the most common details people check are the menu or service list (55%), opening hours (54%), and the address (54%). About 52% want an average rating of at least 4 out of 5 stars.
A Facebook page can hold all of that. But it buries it. Your hours sit under a post from last Tuesday. Your prices live in a photo caption from March. On a website, that information sits at the top of the page, with a tap to call button next to it.
- Hours, address and a phone button should be visible without scrolling.
- A menu or service list should be real text, not only a photo, so it can be read and translated.
- Reviews still matter. Backlinko reports 71% of consumers check reviews for local businesses, and 40% of Americans used Facebook to find reviews in 2025. Keep your page. Just do not make it the only door.
- Over 90 million small businesses use Facebook Pages. Having one does not set you apart.
Does a website help you show up on Google?
Partly. Be careful with anyone who promises more. Google says local results depend on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your listing matches what someone typed. Distance is how close you are to the searcher. Prominence is how well known you are, including review count, rating, and links to your website.
A website helps relevance and prominence. Your Google Business Profile has limited space. A website lets you spell out every service in English and Spanish, so Google can match searches like brake repair or pan dulce to you. But a September 2025 Search Atlas study of 3,269 businesses found proximity was the single biggest factor, about 55% of the measurable ranking influence. No website changes where your shop sits on the map.
Google is also direct about this: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." If someone sells you a guaranteed number one spot, walk away.
- Claim and fill out your Google Business Profile first. It does the showing up.
- The website does the closing. It answers the question that gets you the call.
- Match your name, address and phone on the profile and the site. Mismatches confuse both Google and customers.
The link you should check today
Open Google Maps on your phone. Search your own business. Tap your website link. Does it load? A census of 423,009 local business listings across 24 North American cities found 17% listed no website at all. Of those that did, 8.2% linked to a page that failed to load, and 1.1% linked only to a Facebook page or directory profile. Hair salons had the lowest website adoption at 62.6%.
A dead link is worse than no link. The customer was ready to buy and you sent them to an error page. One common cause: Google used to offer free websites inside Business Profiles, the ones ending in business.site. Google shut those down on March 1, 2024. Visitors were redirected to the profile until June 10, 2024. After that, the link shows a page not found error. If you made one of those sites years ago and never looked again, check now.
- If the link is dead, remove it from your profile today. A blank is better than an error page.
- If it points to Facebook, that is better than nothing, but it sends a ready customer into a feed.
Who actually owns your Facebook page?
You rent your Facebook page. You own a domain name. That is the real difference, and it matters more than design.
Page takeovers are documented. In one case a hacker added themselves as an admin and removed the real owners. Recovery depends on whether the problem is a permission mistake, a hack, or a disabled account. It can require sending documents to Meta support and waiting. When a Business Manager account falls, linked assets go with it: ad accounts, pixels, the Instagram account tied to the page, payment methods, catalogs and shops.
A domain in your own name, a Google Business Profile you control, and your own list of customer phone numbers are assets you keep. Followers are not. Nobody plans to lose a page. The owners it happens to did not plan it either.
- Register your domain under your own email, not a web designer's. Ask for the login and keep it.
- Bookmark Meta's hacked page form now, while you can still log in.
- Write down who has admin access to your page and remove people who no longer work with you.
What about the cost?
Cost is the honest objection and it is a fair one. In SCORE's 2024 data, among owners without a website, 26% cited cost, 27% felt a site was not relevant to their industry, and 21% said they use social media instead. Clutch found the cost share fell from 26% in 2018 to 16% in 2025, as tools got cheaper.
Do it yourself builders like Wix, Squarespace and Canva are fine. Many owners build a solid page with them. The honest tradeoffs are time, writing good copy in two languages, keeping hours and prices current, and connecting it correctly to your Google profile. If you have a slow Sunday and some patience, try it.
Whoever builds it, ask two questions before paying anyone. Who owns the domain? What happens to the files if I stop paying? If the answers are vague, keep your money.
- You do not need a big site. One page with hours, services, address, photos and a call button beats a ten page site nobody updates.
- Budget for upkeep, not just the build. A site with wrong hours costs you trust.
- Most small businesses already have one. The honest range across surveys is 73% to 83% of US small businesses, so owners without a site are now the minority.
When Facebook or Instagram alone is enough
Sometimes it is. It is better to say so than to oversell.
Even in these cases, one thing is not optional: a claimed, complete, accurate Google Business Profile. That is where near me searches land. And if that profile links to a website, the link must load. A fair way to think about it: social media is for people who already know you. Google and a website are for people who do not know you yet.
- You are testing an idea with no fixed location or hours yet.
- You are a stylist, barber or caterer whose Instagram is the portfolio and whose DMs are the booking system, and that is working. Salons have the lowest website adoption at 62.6%, so this is a real pattern, not laziness.
- You are fully booked by referral and do not want to grow.