Does my small business need a website?

When you can skip it for now

A website exists to bring in and convince people who have not met you. If that is not your problem this year, the money can go somewhere more useful. Here are three cases where waiting makes sense.

You are booked solid by word of mouth

If every job comes from a past customer or someone they sent, and you already turn work away, more strangers finding you does not help. You would be paying to fill a calendar that is full. The one catch: a referred customer may look your name up before ringing, and finding nothing at all can make them hesitate. A Business Profile with your number and hours answers that search.

The business is still finding its feet

In the first months, what you sell, what you charge and who buys it can change from one month to the next. A site written in week two will be wrong by month four. Spend on the work first, and keep a phone number and a Business Profile up to date until you know which services people pay for. If you want something online anyway, our guide to building your own website or paying someone explains when a simple page you make yourself is the right call.

Every customer already finds you in one place

Some businesses get all their bookings through one platform: a marketplace, a booking app, a directory their customers already use. If that is working, a separate website adds little for now. Bear in mind that the page is yours only on that platform’s terms. If it changes its fees, its rules or how it ranks people, you have no address of your own to send customers to.

What to do instead

Set up a Google Business Profile. It puts your name, number, hours and reviews in front of anyone who searches for you, and Google says creating one is free. Our guide to setting up a Google Business Profile walks through it, including verification, which is the slow part.

What a website does that a profile or social page can’t

A Business Profile and a social page are useful, and plenty of businesses should have both. They have limits a website does not.

You own it

A social page lives under someone else’s rules, and the platform decides who sees your posts and how your page looks. Your website sits at your own address, and what goes on it is up to you.

Your services and prices, in your words

A profile gives you a short description and a category from a list. A website has room for every service you offer, the areas you cover, what a typical job costs and what happens after someone calls, in the order you choose.

Customers compare before they call

Someone choosing between two businesses can look at both before picking up the phone. If one has a clear page with prices and photos of finished work and the other has only a listing, the first one has answered questions the second has left open.

It is what search engines and AI assistants read

When someone asks a search engine or an assistant who does your kind of work nearby, the answer is put together from what those tools can read. A website built for it says plainly who you are, where you work and what you do, in structured data and in a plain-text summary file called llms.txt. A profile only has room for a handful of fields.

The test: six yes-or-no questions

Answer these about your business as it is now, not as you hope it will be next year.

1. Do people who have never heard of you search for what you do in your area?
2. Do customers ask about your prices, or whether you cover their area, before they will book?
3. Have you lost a job to someone who looked more established?
4. Do you pay for ads anywhere? An ad needs somewhere to send the people who click it, and a profile gives you far less room to make the case.
5. Do you keep typing out the same details by text or message: what you do, what it costs, how booking works?
6. Do customers want to see your work before they hire you?

Two or more yeses and you need a website. Each of those is a customer deciding about you while you are not there to answer, and a website is where that decision gets made. None or one, and a Business Profile will carry you for now. Take the test again when something changes, such as starting to advertise or wanting to grow past the people who already know you.

Having one isn’t the same as having one that works

If you already have a site, the question shifts to whether it is helping. We checked 467 business websites we found advertising on Google, in October 2026. Every one of those businesses was paying for each visitor who clicked through. Of those sites, 72% show at least one sign of dated technology, and among trades and home services it is 81%. The full findings, problem by problem and trade by trade, are in what we found in 467 business websites.

Dated does not always mean broken. Some of these signs a customer never notices, and some, like a layout fixed to a desktop width, leave a visitor on a phone dragging the page sideways to find your number. You can check your own site with our free website audit checklist, or send it for the free Field Test, which uses your site the way a customer would and comes back with the failures on video and a fixed price to fix them.

What it costs

You can build one yourself or pay someone, and which is right depends on your time, how much your customers compare and how much you enjoy the job. The build-it-yourself guide covers that choice, and what a website costs in Canada has the ranges Canadian sources quote.

Droom’s prices are fixed and published. A website is $999 for up to five pages or $1,999 for up to 15, paid once. Every build sets up and verifies your Google Business Profile with the same name, address and phone as the site, and every site carries structured data and llms.txt. Care is optional at $99 a month for hosting, backups and two small edits, each back within 48 hours. A build takes about three weeks from the day you approve the direction. The website design page shows what each tier includes, and the full list is on the pricing page.