Do I still need a website if I've got social media?

In March 2025 I watched some bloke online tell business owners they don’t need a website because they’ve got social media. He also reckoned the business coach who told you to build a website was ‘a dumbass’. It wound me up enough that I posted a rant about it on LinkedIn, and it’s still one of the most-seen things I’ve ever posted that wasn’t a daft sketch. Then I made a whole video about it, which is further down.

I have social media and I still need a website. So do you.

Who owns your Facebook page?

Meta does. You just post on it.

If Meta decides your page doesn’t belong on its platform any more, it deletes it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve seen it happen to some of our clients, and there’s nobody at the other end to ring and complain to.

This actually happened to one of my clients last year. They had 700,000 followers on Facebook and Meta woke up one morning and hit ‘DELETE’ on their page. Queue hours of panicked phone calls. It took 3 days to get it back, but it served as a strong lesson. You don’t own your social media.

Even when nothing goes wrong, you’re not in charge of much. Meta decides what your page looks like and which features you get. It decides who sees your posts and when, and it can change any of that tomorrow without asking you. You’re at the mercy of the algorithm, and the algorithm doesn’t care that you’ve got staff to pay or a business to run.

Your website’s different. The domain’s in your name, and if you fall out with whoever built it you take it somewhere else. Nobody can switch it off because it doesn’t fit their rules (unless you’re running some weird website, in which case you’ve got other problems).

What can a website do that a social media page can’t?

Loads. The useful stuff happens after somebody’s decided they’re interested, and that’s exactly where social media gives up.

Cannon Hall Farm is a farm attraction near us in Barnsley with a national TV following. They still need somewhere to sell a ticket. We built them their own ticketing system and it’s taken over 219,000 bookings and sold more than £10 million in tickets. It runs a Rainy Day Pass that hands out free return tickets automatically if it rains enough on the day of your visit. On one wet day in May it issued 416 of them. Try doing that through Instagram DMs.

Birthday parties at the farm used to be a pile of phone calls and a spreadsheet somewhere. Now parents book and pay through their account on the website, and more than 250 parties have gone through it since it launched in 2025. The farm also owns all the data behind those bookings, so they can see who comes back and who’s drifted off. Their old setup kept the customer relationship inside somebody else’s system, which is exactly the problem with a Facebook page, only with more money attached.

Glasscraft make glass. Before we rebuilt their website, if you wanted a quote you picked up the phone, and if you wanted to know where your order was you picked up the phone again. Now there’s a Quick Quote tool that brings in 60 to 80 quote requests a month, and an order tracker wired into their manufacturing system that gets used 100 to 200 times a month. That’s 100 to 200 phone calls the team don’t have to answer. You can’t plug a Facebook page into your factory.

Your website keeps selling when you’ve gone to bed

A website is the best salesperson you’ll ever pay for. It works all day and all night, and it explains your business the same way every time, which is more than I manage when somebody catches me in the street.

If you’re selling through social media without a website, you’re selling in the DMs. Every single time. Every person who’s interested needs you to answer them personally, tell them the price, explain how it works and find a time to talk. That’s fine for about a week.

I’ve got a page on this website called /start/. When somebody messages me on LinkedIn asking what a website costs or whether we can have a chat, I send them there. It tells you what we cost and lets you book a discovery call. It’s been the most-used page on our website for years, purely because I can send people to it and let it do the boring bit. Without it, I’d be going back and forth with “no, I can’t do Tuesday” until one of us gave up.

That page is a tiny funnel, if you want to use the word. It’s also a page on a website.

▶Play the video: 5 reasons your business STILL needs a website

Does anybody trust a business with no website?

Not really, no.

When I meet somebody at a networking event, I Google them. Everybody does. If there’s no website, that’s weird. A Facebook page with the last post from two summers ago is worse. Any old schmuck can set up a social profile, so having one proves nothing about you.

Turn up with no website and the best people will think of you is that you’re not very good at what you do. The worst is that you’re a scammer. What are you hiding?

A proper website does the opposite. It’s the same as turning up to that networking event in a decent suit. Nobody gives you the job for the suit, but they notice if it’s covered in soup. (A cheap Wix site with a stock photo of a handshake counts as soup. I’ve moaned about Wix before.)

What about ads?

Every bit of marketing you do needs somewhere to send people. Social posts, Google Ads, a flyer, a talk at the chamber of commerce. All of it is trying to get somebody to do something, and the something happens on your website.

That works the other way too, which is why the website has to be good. Wolf Laundry were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads, because their website took ten seconds to load and over half the people they’d paid for gave up before it appeared. We rebuilt the website, they kept the same ads and the same budget, and it now brings in 150 to 200 leads a month. The ads were fine. They just had nowhere decent to land.

So is social media a waste of time?

No, keep posting. Just treat it as the thing that sends people to your website.

When we rebuilt the websites for RNN Group’s colleges, social traffic to North Notts College went up almost 400% and Dearne Valley’s went up 212%. Their websites finally looked decent when somebody tapped a link on a phone, so the same posts started sending people somewhere worth going.

If your social is going well, brilliant. Now give it a website to point at that can take a booking or let somebody pay you without a single DM. That’s most of what we do, which you’d expect me to say, but I’d still say it if I sold carpets.

Google your own business name tonight and look at what a stranger sees. If it’s a Facebook page and a map pin, you’ve got your answer.