Yes, you still need one. Instagram and Facebook are excellent at getting you discovered, but you don't own the account, the audience, or the rules that decide who sees your posts. A website is the one place online where you control the message, keep the contact details, and turn interest into an actual booking or sale.
In plain English
Think of social media as a booth at a busy weekend market. The crowd is enormous, but the market owner decides where your booth sits, who walks past it, and whether you get a spot next weekend at all. Your website is the shop with your name over the door, open whether or not the market is running.
Three things to know
You rent the audience, you don't own it
If an account gets hacked, locked, or simply shown to fewer people, the followers you spent years gathering go with it and there is no one to call.
Search doesn't work like a feed
When someone needs a plumber, a barber, or a caterer, they type it into Google or ask an AI assistant, and those answers point at real websites far more often than at social profiles.
Use both, for different jobs
Let social do the discovering and show your personality, and let your site do the explaining, the pricing conversation, the booking, and the follow-up.
Worth remembering
In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 54% of consumers said they go on to visit a business's website after reading positive reviews, up from 32% when the same question was asked in 2019.
Reviews and social posts are what spark the interest, but more than half of people head to the website next to make up their mind. If there's nothing to land on, that interest quietly goes nowhere.
What to do about it
If you've built a real following on social and want a home base that turns it into paying work, I'm happy to look at what's missing. Get a free website audit.
