“I don’t need a website. I have a Facebook page with two thousand followers.”
We hear it often, and we understand where it comes from. A page is set up in an afternoon, costs nothing, and your customers are already there. Why pay for a second thing?
Because a page and a website do different jobs. And there is one job a page can never do, however many followers it has: belong to you.
A shop window in someone else’s building
Imagine you have a shop window in a large shopping centre. There are lots of people, the window costs no rent, and you dress it however you like. But there are rules, and the owner of the building writes them. He changes the opening hours. He changes the corridors, and suddenly your window is in a corner with less foot traffic. And if he decides something in your window breaks his rules, he can close it.
That is your Facebook page, and the same goes for Instagram. Meta’s terms say it clearly: if it determines you have clearly, seriously or repeatedly breached its terms or policies, it may suspend or permanently disable your access and close the account. The judgement is its own. And there does not even have to be a breach for you to lose it: it is enough for someone to steal the administrator’s account, and the page you spent years building may end up in their hands.
The website is your own shop. The name, that is the address (the domain), is registered to you, if it was done properly. You decide the content. If you do not like your provider, you take the website and go elsewhere. Whether all this is actually true for your own site you can check with the list in the article “Your site’s folder”.
If the platform closes the account: what the law says
In the European Union you are not entirely unprotected. The Digital Services Act (DSA, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065) requires platforms, when they suspend or close an account because they consider the content illegal or in breach of their terms, to explain why (Article 17). And to give you a way to challenge the decision, through an internal complaint-handling system, for at least six months afterwards (Article 20).
That is something. But it is not what a business needs on that day. A right to an explanation and an appeal does not tell you when you will see your page again, or whether you will. And while you wait, the customer looking for you finds nothing.
If your details, your services and your photos also exist on a website of your own, a locked page is a nuisance. If they exist only there, it is a closed shop.
Followers are not an audience that sees you
Two thousand followers look like a customer list. They are not.
When you publish a post, the two thousand do not all see it. Whoever the platform decides sees it, based on what it thinks interests each person that day. Followers are an audience that may see you. How many actually saw you, the platform tells you afterwards, and the rule may change tomorrow without anyone asking you.
And you cannot take these people with you. You do not have their email or their phone number. If the page goes, they go too.
Who finds you when they search
A Facebook page works well for people who already know you and follow you. A new customer, though, does not start there. They search Google for “electrician Marousi”. Or they ask ChatGPT “which English school in Chalandri has classes for adults”.
There, what counts is how clearly your key business details are written on pages that machines can read freely: what you do, where you are, when you are open, how people reach you. On a Facebook page these are usually scattered across posts, inside photos, in comments. And a visitor without a Facebook account often sees a few posts before being asked to log in.
On your website the same details are written once, as text, at an address you control. That is what Google and the answer engines read. That is why we have written separately about where else people look for you outside Google, and about how to set up your Google Business Profile properly, which completes the picture together with your website and your page.
We are not telling you to close the page
Quite the opposite. A Facebook page and an Instagram account are useful, and for many businesses they are the liveliest way to talk to customers. The question is not “page or website”. It is which of the two is home and which is the bridge.
The page is the bridge: it brings people in. The website is home: that is where people find everything, and where everything stays whatever happens to the bridge. Every post that leads to the website makes both work, and with properly set-up measurement you also learn which post brought whom, as we explain in “The post got three hundred likes. How many came to the site?”.
Five steps so you do not lose what you built
- The website’s name in your name. The domain should be registered to the business, not to whoever built the site or to an employee who may leave.
- Your key business details on the website, as text. Who you are, what you do, where you are, when you are open, how people reach you. Not only in a photo of your opening hours.
- Two administrators on the page, not one. Both with two-step verification on their accounts. If one loses access, the other saves it.
- An access email controlled by the business. Not the personal email of the nephew who set up the page five years ago.
- A copy of your content outside the platform. The good photos, the texts about your services, the reviews you are proud of. If they disappear from there, they should exist somewhere else.
None of this costs much. It only needs to be done before it is needed.
If your business today lives only on Facebook or Instagram, we start with something simple: a small website, on a domain in your name, with your key business details written clearly: what you do, where you are, when you are open and how people reach you. We build it so that Google and the answer engines read it correctly. And on your social media, if you like, every post leads there, with a link that measures. See website development and social media management, or send us through the form the address of your page.
