Do I Need a Website in 2026?
A straight answer from an agency that has told plenty of people not to bother yet. Who genuinely does not need a site, what a Facebook page cannot do, and the cheapest version worth building.
Most Australian businesses do need a website, and the honest exceptions are narrower than people hope. If buyers search before they ring, compare two or three names, or spend more than a few hundred dollars with you, you need one. If you are booked out on word of mouth for the next year, or you sell entirely through a marketplace, you can wait.
Who genuinely does not need a website?
Start with the exceptions, because most articles on this subject pretend they do not exist. We have told people to hold off. Here is when.
- The sole trader with a twelve month waiting list. If your diary is full until next winter and every job comes from one builder you have worked with for a decade, a website will not change your revenue this year. It might change it in year three, when that builder retires.
- Anyone trading entirely inside a marketplace. If your sales all come through eBay, Etsy, Amazon Australia or Airtasker, your listings are the shopfront and your ratings are the reputation. A site starts earning its keep when you want the margin back and a direct customer list.
- A business living off a single wholesale contract. One buyer, one purchase order, no public marketing at all. A website does nothing for that relationship. It hedges the day the contract ends, which is the real argument for building one.
- Someone winding down. Retiring or selling inside a year, spend the money elsewhere.
Notice what those four have in common. Demand already exists and it does not arrive through search. The moment that stops being true, the maths flips, and it usually stops being true faster than the owner expects.
What does a website do that a Facebook or Instagram page cannot?
Four things, and each matters more than it sounds. You own it. It ranks. It outlives the platform’s decisions. And it sells while you are asleep.
Ownership is the boring one that bites hardest. A Facebook page or Instagram account sits on land you rent from a company that can restrict, suspend or reinvent it without warning, and there is no phone number to ring when that happens. We have watched a client lose an Instagram account with a few thousand followers to a hacked login and spend six weeks arguing with an automated appeals form. Their website kept taking enquiries the whole time.
Ranking is the second. Type “electrician Parramatta” or “conveyancer Newcastle” into Google and count the Facebook pages on page one. Social profiles sometimes rank for a business name. They almost never rank for the service plus suburb searches that produce paying work; those go to websites, map listings and directories.
Third, algorithms move under you. Organic reach for a small business page has been sliding for years and nothing you do about it stays fixed. Search is not immune to change either, but at least your own pages are not competing with your customers’ cousins’ holiday photos for room in a feed.
Last, timing. A fair share of the enquiries our clients get land outside business hours, tapped out on a phone by someone who found the site at 9pm and would rather not wait until morning. A form, a booking link and a price range all work at that hour. A direct message you will not open until Tuesday does not.
Rule of thumb: if a platform suspending your account tonight would leave you with no way for a customer to reach you tomorrow, you are not running a business on that platform, you are borrowing one. At minimum register your own domain and put your email on it. That costs about $20 a year and it is yours.
Do buyers actually check your website before they ring?
Yes, and they do it in about twenty seconds. The sequence is predictable. Someone gets your name from a mate or reads it off your van, types the business name into Google, and decides whether you look like a real operation. Reviews, a site, a photo of actual finished work. If the only thing that comes up is a Facebook page last posted to in 2023, a share of those people quietly ring the next name on the list, and you never find out it happened.
The check gets harsher as the price climbs. Nobody researches a $60 haircut. Plenty of people research a $14,000 bathroom, a mortgage broker, a family lawyer, or an accountant who is about to see every number in their business. In finance, legal and healthcare the absence of a site reads as either brand new or something being hidden, fair or not. That is who a lot of our small business web design work is built for, and the pattern is consistent enough that we plan around it: proof, licence numbers, faces, a clear service area, and prices or at least a range.
Can I just use a Google Business Profile instead of a website?
You can, and for some local businesses it will bring in real work. A complete Google Business Profile, with the right categories, photos, hours and a steady drip of reviews, can rank in the map pack with no website behind it. A mobile mechanic or a mowing round might fill a week on that alone.
Here is where it caps out. Google retired its free profile websites in March 2024, so the old business.site addresses stopped working and now simply bounce visitors back to the profile. The profile itself gives you almost no room to explain anything: no service pages, no case studies, no pricing detail, no form of your own, no way to capture an email address. You cannot appear in the normal organic results for “commercial electrician Sydney” because there is no page to rank. And profiles do get suspended, sometimes for reasons Google will not explain, at which point you have nothing at all.
There is also a feedback loop worth knowing. A profile backed by a real site, with a matching business name, address and phone number, tends to hold up better than one floating on its own. If you are starting from zero, do the profile first because it is free and fast, then the website. Not instead of.
Which situations need a website now, and which can wait?
This is the table we would sketch on a napkin if you asked us over coffee. Find the row closest to your situation.
| Your situation | Do you need a site now? | What to do instead, or first |
|---|---|---|
| Sole trader booked out six to twelve months on referrals | Not yet | Claim and fill the Google Business Profile, bank reviews while work is good, revisit when the diary thins |
| Trade or service business quoting jobs over $2,000 | Yes | Five pages: services, service area, proof of work, prices or ranges, quote form |
| Retail selling only through Etsy, eBay or Amazon | Not urgent | Register the domain now, build when marketplace fees start eating the margin |
| Manufacturer or supplier on one wholesale contract | No, but you are exposed | One page plus a capability statement, so you can pitch buyer number two |
| Accountant, broker, lawyer, allied health | Yes, non negotiable | Nothing replaces it. Credentials, people, process, contact |
| Cafe, restaurant or shop with a street frontage | Yes, a small one | Menu, hours, map, ordering or booking link. Three pages is plenty |
| Brand new business, no customers yet | Yes, but keep it minimal | One page and a profile. Put the rest of the budget into finding the first ten customers |
| Selling through Instagram direct messages | Yes, soon | Start with a landing page carrying prices and a booking link, grow it later |
| Retiring or selling the business within a year | No | Keep the profile accurate and spend the money on the handover |
What is the minimum viable website if the budget is tight?
Five pages, one job each, nothing clever. Home, services, about, contact, and one page of proof. Built properly on WordPress by someone who expects to still be around in five years, a small business site like that sits at roughly $1,500 to $3,500 excluding GST, plus about $20 a year for a .com.au domain and $15 to $40 a month for decent Australian hosting. A careful DIY build on a site builder can come in under $500 for the first year, if your own time is genuinely free, which for most owners it is not.
What has to be on it: a tappable phone number in the header; what you do and where you do it, in plain words, before anyone scrolls; a form that actually lands in your inbox (test it, then test it again in six months, because forms break silently); proof in the form of photos, reviews and whatever licence or registration numbers your industry expects; and a page that loads in under three seconds on a phone on mobile data.
What can wait: the blog, custom photography, animations, a chat widget, a booking system wired into your accounting software, and anything a quote describes as a brand refresh. None of that gets you the first ten enquiries. If you want the full picture of scope and pricing before you commit, how we build and price websites lays out what sits inside a build and what is genuinely optional.
When should you spend on ads or your profile before building a site?
If you have $3,000 and no customers, order of operations matters more than the total. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile first. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and in a lot of local trades it produces enquiries within weeks. Chase reviews second. Paid traffic third.
You cannot really skip the site and jump straight to Google Ads, though. Ads need a landing page, and Google grades that page as part of what you pay per click, so aiming ads at a social profile is both clumsy and expensive, and you lose conversion tracking along with any ability to change what the visitor sees. Meta ads can run to a profile or a lead form, which is why some businesses start there. That works for an impulse offer. It works badly for a $9,000 job somebody needs to think about for three days.
The order we would run for a new local service business: profile, then a small site, then reviews, then ads once you know which service actually makes money. Paying for clicks that land on something you cannot edit is a fast way to spend a marketing budget with nothing to show for it.
Nobody can promise you a website will produce a set number of enquiries, and any agency quoting guaranteed rankings or guaranteed leads is selling something they cannot control. The ACCC takes a dim view of it too. What a site reliably does is stop you losing work you had already earned through referrals and reputation.
What should you actually do this week?
If the table above put you in the yes column, four moves in order. Register the domain today, in your own name, on your own account. Set up or clean up the Google Business Profile. Write down the five questions every prospect asks you on the phone, because that is your site content and it is worth more than any copywriter’s first draft. Then get two quotes for a small build and ask each one what happens in year two, because that is where cheap sites get expensive.
If you landed in the not yet column, put a reminder in the calendar for six months. Then go back to work. Plenty more on scoping, pricing and platform choice sits in our websites guides when you are ready.
Common questions
Can I use my Facebook page as my website?
As a stopgap, yes. Set the page up properly, add hours, services and a contact button, and it will do a job. What it will not do is rank for the searches that bring in work, capture leads into something you control, or survive a suspension. Treat it as a channel rather than a home. Register the domain now so you have somewhere to move when you are ready.
Is a one page website enough to start?
For a new business with one service and no budget, yes. A single well written page with what you do, where you do it, proof, prices and a form will beat a five page site full of filler. The limit is search: one page can realistically rank for one topic. Once you sell three or four distinct services, you need a page for each, and the one pager becomes the home page of a bigger site.
How long after launch before a new website brings enquiries?
Direct traffic works immediately. Anyone who has your card, your van number or your name will find the site the day it goes live and can enquire that night. Search traffic is slower. For a new domain in a competitive Australian city, expect three to six months before organic search contributes anything meaningful, and longer in crowded categories like conveyancing or personal training.
Will AI assistants make websites pointless?
The opposite, so far. Assistants answer questions by reading pages, then cite where the answer came from. If your prices, service area and process are only inside a Facebook post or a phone call, you are invisible to that whole layer. Businesses with clear, structured, well written pages are the ones getting quoted back to buyers. The website stops being just a destination and becomes the source.
Should I register a domain even if I am not building yet?
Yes, and it is the cheapest insurance in this article. A .com.au runs about $20 a year. Register it in your own name with your own registrar account, not through a mate or a designer, so nobody else holds it. Point the email at it straight away. Nothing marks a business as small quite like a Gmail address on a quote for a $20,000 job.
What does it cost to keep a website running each year?
Budget $400 to $1,200 a year excluding GST for a small business site: domain around $20, Australian hosting $15 to $40 a month, and either your own time or a maintenance plan for WordPress updates, backups and security. Skipping the maintenance is the usual false economy. A hacked or broken site typically costs more to fix once than three years of looking after it properly.
Not sure whether a website is your next spend?
Tell us what your business actually needs and we will give you a straight answer, including the times that answer is not yet. Sydney based, building and maintaining websites for Australian businesses since 2004, no lock-in contracts.