Insights / websites
Yes. A Facebook page is not your business website. Social platforms change, get banned, or fade. Your website is the one place you control, and the one AI search tools can reliably read.
Yes. If you have a Facebook page, you still need a business website.
Your Facebook page lives on Facebook’s website, not yours. You do not own it. You cannot control when it goes down, when the algorithm changes, or when the platform loses users. A business website is a separate address you control, where your hours, services, contact info, and booking links stay in one stable place.
That is the short answer, and it comes down to ownership.
Yes. Facebook is a website. So is Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X.
That is where a lot of the confusion starts. People search “is Facebook a website” because they are trying to figure out whether their Facebook page counts as having a web presence for their business. It does not work that way.
Your Facebook page is a profile on someone else’s platform. It is not a business website. You rent the space. They set the rules, own the data, and decide what gets shown.
Yes. Every time.
A Facebook page is good for posting and reaching people who already use the platform. It is not a replacement for a website because:
One simple landing page on a domain you control fixes most of this. Post on Facebook. Link back to your site. That is the setup.
Social platforms are not permanent. They get banned, blocked, or abandoned.
On January 18, 2025, TikTok went dark for U.S. users in a voluntary shutdown that lasted about 14 hours, from roughly 10:30 p.m. ET on January 18 to about 12:30 p.m. ET on January 19. More than 170 million Americans use the app.
The app stayed off Apple and Google app stores for about 26 more days, until February 13, 2025.
Businesses felt it immediately. Live shopping events and brand deals were canceled that weekend. Sellers who used TikTok Shop as their main storefront had no backup. In TikTok’s own December 2024 court filing, the company projected that a full month without the platform would cost U.S. small businesses and creators about $1.3 billion. An Oxford Economics report cited in that filing found that 39% of small businesses on TikTok said the platform was critical to their business’s existence.
The Wall Street Journal reported on sellers who built their entire operation on TikTok, with some tying 90% or more of sales to the app. Fourteen hours offline was enough to show the risk.
Turkey blocked Instagram nationwide on August 2, 2024, cutting off more than 57 million users in a country of about 85 million. Access came back on August 10, after nine days.
Small businesses and e-commerce sellers who relied on Instagram for discovery and sales reported immediate drops. Industry groups in Turkey estimated daily losses in the tens of millions of dollars during the ban, though exact figures vary by source.
When TikTok went dark for 14 hours, sellers with no website had nowhere to send people. Nine days without Instagram left Turkish shops in the same spot. Post on the apps. Keep one address that is actually yours.
MySpace was the center of online social life before Facebook took over. Facebook and Instagram became the default for local business ads. TikTok changed short video. Each new generation picks a new app. Governments block platforms. Companies shut them down or sell them off.
The list will keep changing.
What has not changed is the website: you own the domain, you control the page, and you publish on your terms. Websites have outlasted every social platform shift since the early 2000s.
People still Google businesses. They also ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI assistants for recommendations. Those tools pull answers from public web pages they can find and read.
They do not read your Facebook feed or Instagram stories the same way. If your hours, menu, services, or contact info only live inside social posts, you are invisible when someone asks Google or an AI assistant for an answer.
People call it AEO or GEO depending on the week. Either way, a public website is still the most reliable way to show up when someone asks for what you do.
On Yakima Valley Events, I build pages so search engines and AI tools can find them. Search Console shows queries and clicks growing over time. Traffic reports now also show ChatGPT sending visitors. That only happens because those pages are public and easy to read.
You do not need a 50-page site. You need a home base you own:
| On the page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Who you are and what you do | Plain language, no jargon |
| How to reach you | One consistent phone, email, and address |
| One clear next step | Contact form, hours, menu, booking, or directions |
| Links to the socials you actually use | Easy to add or remove when platforms change |
That covers Google, someone checking a referral, and a stranger searching at 9 p.m. who will not wait for your next post.
If you have a Facebook page, do you need a business website? Yes.
It does not have to be Facebook. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever platform is working for you today. The answer is the same.
Social gets the word out. Your website is the official answer search engines and AI can read, and it stays open when the platform changes. Keep posting where your people already are. Link every profile back to one place you control.
Every business needs a website. Growing ones need better tools.
Not sure what you actually need?
We will look at how your business works today and figure out what is worth building, and what is not.