The short answer
You need both, because they do different jobs. But if you can genuinely only have one, the deciding question is not which is better — it is how your customers currently find you.
- If nearly all your work comes from people who already know you, or know someone who does, your Facebook page is doing more of the work today.
- If people find you by searching for the thing you sell, a website is doing work that Facebook structurally cannot.
What a Facebook page genuinely does better
Worth saying plainly, because most people selling websites skip it.
- It reaches people who already follow you. A post about being closed Thursday reaches your regulars faster than any website update ever will.
- Messaging is where people already are. Plenty of customers will send a Facebook message who would never fill in a contact form.
- It is free, and it is easy. No hosting, no domain, no invoice. That is not nothing.
- Photos are effortless. Post from your phone in ten seconds. Most business websites are worse at this than Facebook.
If someone tells you a Facebook page is worthless, they are selling something.
What it cannot do
You do not own it
This is the one that matters most and gets thought about least. The page, the followers, the reviews and the message history sit on someone else's platform under someone else's rules. Pages get restricted or removed for policy reasons, and sometimes in error, and the appeal process is largely automated. It does not happen often. It is catastrophic when it does, and there is no backup.
A website is an asset you control. That difference does not matter at all until the day it matters completely.
You do not control who sees it
Reach on a Facebook page is decided by Facebook, and the long-term direction has been that unpaid reach for business pages falls. You are renting access to your own followers. Nothing you do on your own website is subject to that.
It is poorly built for being searched rather than browsed
Facebook is a browsing platform. Someone in the next county typing "hardware store near me" or "window tint prices" into Google is not browsing — they are searching, and Google usually has very little of substance to return from a Facebook page. Most of the useful detail lives inside individual posts and inside Facebook's own interface.
It cannot carry structured data
The machine-readable description of your business — what you are, where, your hours, your prices — is what feeds Google's richer results and, increasingly, what AI assistants read when someone asks them for a recommendation. You cannot add that to a Facebook page. You can add it to a website, and that is becoming a bigger deal quite quickly.
A test worth running: open a private browser window and search for what you sell plus your town. Not your business name — your service. If nothing of yours comes back, every one of those searches is going to a competitor, and your Facebook page is not going to fix it.
The case that made this concrete for us
General Hardware & Supply in Lobelville had been trading since 2005 — ten thousand items in stock, six days a week, a 4.7 rating from more than sixty neighbours — and had no website at all.
Nothing was wrong with the business. The problem was that somebody forty minutes away who wanted to know whether they carried a particular fitting, or whether they did propane, or what time they closed on Saturday, had no way to find out except by ringing up or driving over. Most people do neither. They search, get nothing, and go to the chain store in the next county — and you never learn that you lost the sale.
That is the real cost, and it is invisible. It does not show up as a complaint. It shows up as business that never happened.
So: what should you actually do?
- Keep the Facebook page. Genuinely. It is doing work.
- Claim your Google Business Profile if you have not. It is free, it is where reviews live, and it is what appears when somebody Googles your name after a friend mentions you.
- Get a website that answers the practical questions. What you sell, where you are, when you are open, how to reach you. It does not need to be elaborate. It needs to exist and to be findable.
- Point them at each other. Facebook link on the site, website link on the page.
What it costs
Less than most people expect, which is the other reason this question gets asked defensively. A one-page site that covers the practical questions is $499 plus $59 a month, and the full breakdown — including what the monthly actually buys and the honest first-year total — is on the pricing guide.
And if a page builder would genuinely serve you better, that guide says so too.