Do I Need a Website If I Have a Facebook Page?

Google's guidelines for business listings say the website you list can't be a page created on a social media site. Not discouraged. Not allowed. That one rule settles most of this argument before anyone gets to the part about branding.

So the short answer is yes, you probably need a website if you have a Facebook page. But not for the reasons most agency blogs give, and there's a real list of Ottawa businesses that genuinely don't. We'll get to both.

Prices below are Canadian dollars, before 13% HST.

Google won't accept your Facebook page as your website

When someone in Ottawa searches "barbershop near me" or "pho Barrhaven," the thing they see first isn't a website. It's the map panel — hours, phone number, reviews, photos, and a Website button. That panel is the most valuable piece of local real estate a small business can hold, and it's free.

Google's guidelines for representing your business say the website you list must represent your actual business location, and specifically prohibit URLs that refer users to "landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business, including pages created on social media sites."

Paste in your Facebook URL and you're outside the guidelines. So the Website button on the highest-intent surface you have access to sits empty, while your competitor two blocks over has a live link.

Here's the concession, though, and it's a real one: a well-maintained Google Business Profile with current hours, good photos and forty reviews will carry a local business further than a bad website will. If you only ever do one thing, claim and fill out that profile. It's just that the profile has a website-shaped hole in it, and only a website fills it.

Where people actually look in 2026

CIRA's 2026 Canadian Internet Trends report, a survey of 2,000 Canadian internet users conducted in March 2026, found that 86% of Canadians made an online purchase in the past year and that 52% now use AI as a search engine.

That second number matters more for you than it sounds. When someone asks an assistant "who repairs bikes in Hintonburg," it answers from pages it can read. Facebook restricts crawling on most of its site — you can check facebook.com/robots.txt yourself — so the businesses that get named in those answers are overwhelmingly the ones with a page that can be indexed and quoted.

A Facebook page is a feed. It's built for people who already follow you. A website is an address, and it's built for people who don't know you yet.

What each one is actually good for

	Facebook page	Your own website
Cost to start	$0	$149 upfront, $65/mo at Kove Studios
Allowed in your Google Business Profile website field	No	Yes
Findable by someone who's never heard of you	Weak	Strong
Readable by AI assistants and search engines	Restricted	Yes
Talking to people who already follow you	Excellent	Poor
Paid local advertising	Excellent	Not directly
Survives an account suspension	No	Yes
Yours to keep	No	Yes — domain in your name

Neither column wins outright, which is why the honest recommendation is almost never "delete your Facebook page." Keep posting. Keep boosting the Saturday special. Just stop asking the page to be your address.

The reach problem nobody mentions until you've hired them

Most agencies open with organic reach, and they usually overstate it. Here's the actual figure. Socialinsider's 2026 benchmarks, built from 25 million posts across 130,683 business pages between January 2024 and December 2025, put the average organic engagement rate on a Facebook page at 0.15% of followers. Posts containing a link do worst of all formats, at 0.05%.

Run that on a real page. You've got 900 followers, which is respectable for an Ottawa café. You post that you're closing early Monday for a staff event. On average, that post gets interactions from something like one or two of them.

That's not Meta being unfair to you. It's a feed with more supply than attention, ranked accordingly. But it does mean the followers you spent three years collecting are not an audience you can reliably reach for free, and any plan that depends on them is built on rented ground.

When a Facebook page genuinely is enough

We'd rather say this plainly than have you find out after signing something. Don't buy a website if:

• You're booked solid and turning work away. A website is a customer-acquisition tool. If more customers would make your life worse, you don't need one, and nobody selling you one will volunteer that.
• Your whole business runs inside Marketplace. If you're reselling furniture and every transaction starts and ends in a Marketplace listing, a website adds a step and removes you from where the buyers are.
• You're seasonal or part-time, earning a few thousand a year. $65/mo against $3,000 of annual revenue is a bad trade. Wait until the numbers change.
• You're still testing whether the business works at all. Get the idea in front of people first. If you want to hold the name while you decide, our pre-launch page is $9.99 one-time with the domain held for three months, which is a much better use of your money than a full site you might not need.

That list costs us work, and we'd still rather write it down than talk someone into a monthly bill they'll resent by March.

The risk that actually keeps owners up at night

You do not own your Facebook page. You have an account, subject to policies that change without your input, enforced largely by automated systems, with an appeals process that runs through a form rather than a phone number. Ask around any local business group and you'll find someone whose page got restricted over something they still don't understand. They discover on the same afternoon that their menu, their hours, their photos, their reviews and their entire customer messaging history lived somewhere they don't control.

CIRA's report found 60% of Canadians received a suspicious or fraudulent message in the past year, which is the other half of this: impersonation pages using your name and your photos are trivial to create, and a customer who lands on one has no easy way to tell. A domain you own is the one thing that's hard to fake.

This is also the question to ask any monthly web provider before you sign, including us. Ours in writing: your domain stays in your name, and if you leave, we hand over the code. No exit fee to get your own site back. If a provider won't put that in a sentence that short, that's your answer.

What it costs to stop depending on it

Our Basic package is $149 upfront and $65/mo — $168.37 and $73.45 with HST. That's one custom page with your services, hours, prices, photos and a contact form, on your own domain, live in five days. It fills the Google website field, it's readable by search engines and AI assistants, and it doesn't disappear if a Meta system flags something.

Hosting, security updates and support are in the monthly, not billed separately later. Twelve-month minimum, then month-to-month with 30 days notice.

If you need more than one page — separate menu, services, about, booking — that's the $299 and $95/mo tier. We wrote up the full market range, ours and everyone else's, in what a website actually costs in Ontario, including the cases where a $3,000 quote is the correct answer.

Do this next

Search your own business on Google, on your phone, the way a customer would. Look at the map panel. If the Website button is missing, or it points somewhere that isn't yours, that's the gap — and it's the cheapest one you'll ever close.

Then, if you want to see what filling it would look like before spending anything, ask us for a free mockup. Real design, your business, 48 hours, no payment info. You can also see how the build works or look at what we've made first.