Do I need a website if I have a Facebook page?
The short answer
Yes, and the reason is not that social pages are bad — it is that you do not own one. Your reach is set by an algorithm, your account can be lost or restricted with no appeal, and none of what you post accumulates anywhere you control. A social page is where people find you. A website is where the facts live and the only half you actually own.
On this page
What a social page genuinely does better
Worth starting here, because the honest answer is not "social bad, website good".
Discovery. People find businesses by scrolling, and no website replicates that. Someone who was not looking for you can still end up following you.
Recency. A post from this morning signals an open, active business more immediately than a website ever will.
Conversation. Messages, comments, replies. It is where a lot of customers now prefer to talk, and pretending otherwise costs you enquiries.
If you have a strong social presence and no website, you have not made a mistake. You have built half of something.
The three things it cannot do
1. You do not own it. This is the whole argument, and it is not theoretical. Accounts get hacked, mistakenly flagged, restricted, or lost when the person who set it up leaves. The appeals process is a form and a wait, and often there is no reply at all. Businesses who have been through it say the same thing every time: the followers were never the asset — the ability to reach them was, and it was never theirs.
2. It does not answer the question people are actually asking. Somebody deciding at 9pm wants your prices, your hours, whether you deliver, whether you take card, where to park, what is on the menu. That information exists on a social page only in the sense that it was posted in March and is now four hundred posts down. A website is a place where facts sit still.
3. Search engines and AI assistants mostly cannot use it. When someone searches for what you do, or asks an assistant to recommend somewhere, the answer is assembled from pages that can be read and understood. A social profile contributes very little to that. Everything you post makes the platform's domain stronger, not yours.
The reach problem, specifically
This is the part that changes slowly enough that people do not notice.
Organic reach on social platforms has fallen consistently for years. A page with two thousand followers frequently reaches a small fraction of them, and the number is not yours to control — it is a business decision made by a company whose interests are not aligned with yours. The way to reach your own followers reliably is now to pay.
So the audience you spent three years building is one you rent access to. That is worth knowing before you decide the page is enough.
The minimum website worth having
If you build only one page, it needs six things. This is a genuinely small amount of work and it covers most of the gap.
- What you do and where, in the first line
- Prices, or at least a range — see should I put prices on my website
- Opening hours, correct today
- How to contact you in one tap — phone, WhatsApp, or a form
- Real photographs of the actual place or work
- Your own domain name, which is the part that makes it yours
That last one is the one people skip and the only one that gets more expensive to fix later. Register it before anything else — see what is a domain name.
The arrangement that works
Both, doing different jobs.
Social for discovery, personality and conversation. The website for everything that has to be true, findable and permanent. The link in your bio should point at a page that answers what the post was about, not at a homepage — see Instagram vs a website.
The reason this usually fails is not disagreement. It is that posting takes thirty seconds and updating a website takes an email and a wait, so the site slowly becomes the stale half and then people conclude the site was not worth it. That conclusion is about the arrangement rather than about websites.
What this looks like in Helm
The specific problem above is what Helm exists to remove. Prices, hours, photographs and page text are fields you edit and press Go Live on, with a live preview so you see it before anyone else does — so keeping the site current costs about what posting costs, and the owned half stops being the neglected one by default.
The domain goes in your business's name as standard, which is the difference between having a website and renting one. And the site ships as real HTML with structured data, so it is readable by the search engines and AI assistants that a social profile cannot reach.
If you already have a site you like, Helm can attach a dashboard to it rather than rebuild it — the point is the maintenance gap, not the design.
The short version
Keep the social page. It is doing a job the website cannot. But put the facts somewhere you own, on a domain in your name, and make sure updating it is cheap enough that you actually do it — because a stale website is the thing that convinces people they never needed one.