Facebook Page vs Website: Why Your Own Website Matters Most

Your Facebook Page is busy. Customers message you there, people tag you when a friend asks for a recommendation, and the photos of your work get likes. A website can feel like an expense you don’t need.

What separates them is ownership, more than looks or features. A website on a domain registered to you is yours: you decide what goes on it and which company hosts it, and you can move it if you fall out with that company. A Facebook Page runs on Meta’s terms. Those terms let Meta suspend or disable accounts and take Pages down, and Meta decides who sees your posts.

So yes, you need a website, and it should be your base. That doesn’t mean deleting Facebook. It means using Facebook for what it’s good at and pointing the people it reaches back to a site you control.

A word on bias: we build websites, so we have an interest here. Where Facebook wins, we’ll say so.

Facebook Page vs website at a glance

	Facebook Page	Your own website
Who owns it	You keep ownership of what you post, but the Page runs on Meta’s platform and terms	You, if the domain name is registered to you, plus the content you create
Who sets the rules	Meta, which can update its terms with at least 30 days’ notice	You, within the law and your hosting and domain providers’ terms
Who decides who sees it	Meta’s Feed ranking	Search engines rank it (no guarantees); anyone can visit directly
Can it be taken away?	Yes: accounts can be suspended or disabled and Pages taken down, with an appeal route	Not by a platform’s decision about your posts, but domains need renewing and providers have their own terms
Can you move it?	No. The Page lives on Facebook	Yes, if the domain is in your name. You can move your domain and site to another provider
Found on Google for “[service] [town]”	Can appear in Google, but has no service or area pages	Can be built around the services and places you cover
ChatGPT search	facebook.com’s robots.txt blocks ChatGPT’s search crawler (checked 29 September 2026)	Can appear if you don’t block that crawler
Reaching people you already know	Strong: huge UK reach, built-in recommendations and messaging	Weak on its own. There’s no feed, so people have to come to it
Cost	Free to use; Meta is paid by advertisers	Build and running costs (see what a website costs in the UK)

What you own on Facebook, and what you don’t

First, Meta doesn’t own your photos or posts. Its Terms of Service (effective 4 March 2026, English UK version) say you “retain ownership of the intellectual property rights” in content you create and share. In return, Meta gets a broad licence to use that content, “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free and worldwide”, until it’s deleted from Meta’s systems.

What you don’t own is the Page itself: its address, its layout, its audience and its rules. Facebook is free because, as Meta puts it, “businesses, organisations and other persons pay us to show you ads”. That’s a fair deal for many businesses, but you’re working to Meta’s terms (and its Commercial Terms, once you run a Page for a business).

A website works differently. You register a domain name (your address on the web, such as yourbusiness.co.uk) and pay a hosting company to keep the site online. Nominet, which runs .uk domains, treats the person or business a domain is registered to as its “legal owner”. Through Nominet’s online services account, that owner can move a .uk domain to a different registrar (the company you bought it through) or transfer it to someone else. As long as it’s registered to you, the address stays yours whoever builds or hosts the site.

How a business can lose its Facebook Page

None of this means your Page will disappear, and there’s no reliable data on how often it happens. The point is that Meta decides. In its own words:

Accounts can be suspended or disabled. Meta’s Terms say that if it decides you’ve “clearly, seriously or repeatedly breached our Terms or Policies”, it “may suspend or permanently disable your access”. It can also disable or delete an account “if we detect that someone may have used it without your permission and we are unable to confirm your ownership of the account”. In other words, a hacked account you can’t prove is yours.

Pages can be taken down. Meta’s help page on why Pages get taken down or limited includes Pages that don’t follow its Community Standards and severe or repeated breaches of its advertising policies.

Your Page depends on the people who run it. A Page has no login of its own. It’s run through its admins’ personal Facebook profiles, and Meta lists these among the common reasons a Page is taken down or limited:

• “Not all admins of your Page have authentic profiles”.
• “People who manage your Page have acted against our Community Standards”. Meta’s advice: “Make sure that you only add admins that you know and trust”.
• If no one has full control, the Page “will be automatically deactivated and scheduled for deletion”.

So a Page can suffer for something that has nothing to do with your business, such as a former employee’s profile or the only admin getting locked out.

Appeals exist, but they have limits. For a suspended personal account, Meta’s help page says “You can appeal the suspension within 180 days”, although the period “varies by region”. If you don’t appeal, or the appeal fails, the account is permanently disabled and “You won’t be able to request another review of the decision.”

You can’t simply start again. If Meta disables your account for a breach, you “agree not to create another account without our permission”. And under its Pages, groups and events policy, when a Page is removed for breaking policy, its admins “will not be permitted to create new Pages, groups or events with the same or similar subject matter in the future.”

To be fair to Meta, its Terms say it will normally tell you when it acts and explain your review options, and there’s a proper route for recovering a hacked Page. Losing a Page isn’t automatically the end. But the decision is Meta’s.

Meta decides who sees your posts, and can change the rules

Even when nothing goes wrong, your followers won’t necessarily see what you post. Meta’s Transparency Centre (updated 11 June 2025) explains that the Feed mixes posts from friends and “Pages you’ve liked” with recommended content and ads. Feed ranking decides what appears and in what order, using “thousands of different signals”, because “most people have more content in their Feed than they could possibly browse in one session.”

Meta doesn’t publish a figure for how many followers see a typical Page post, so treat any percentage you see quoted with caution. What matters is who decides, and it isn’t you. Meta has shifted that balance before. In January 2018 its then head of News Feed announced that Facebook would “show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses”, and that “Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease.” That says nothing about reach today, but it shows Meta can change how Pages are shown. The Terms can change too: Meta gives “at least 30 days” notice, and if you keep using Facebook afterwards, “you will be bound by them”.

What your own website does that a Page can’t

It explains what you do, service by service and place by place

A website can have a page for each service and each area you cover, with the detail customers want before they get in touch. That’s how you give Google something relevant to show when someone searches “boiler repair Malvern” rather than your business name. Our guide to service and location pages explains how to plan them.

This isn’t about Google ignoring Facebook. When we checked, Facebook’s robots.txt file (the instructions a site gives crawlers, the programs search engines use to read pages) let Googlebot reach ordinary Page addresses, so your Page can appear in Google, for example when someone searches your name. It just can’t be built around the services and towns you want to be found for.

It helps with Google’s local results

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and that prominence partly depends on “how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have” (Google’s local ranking tips). Nobody can link to a website you don’t have. A website also gives your Google Business Profile somewhere proper to point: Google’s Business Profile guidelines ask for a website “that represents your individual business location”. There’s more in how the Google 3-pack works and, for trades, local SEO for tradesmen.

It can show up in ChatGPT search

When we checked on 29 September 2026, facebook.com’s robots.txt didn’t name OAI-SearchBot, the crawler behind ChatGPT’s search features, so Facebook’s catch-all “Disallow: /” rule applied to it. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says blocked sites “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.”

That applies to ChatGPT search only. It doesn’t mean ChatGPT knows nothing about your business, and Facebook can change the file at any time. But you decide whether your own website lets that crawler in. Google’s AI Overviews draw on pages in Google’s normal index, so the same website foundations help there too. More in why ChatGPT recommends your competitor.

What a website won’t do

Google says it “doesn’t guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page”, and it won’t take payment to rank anyone higher (how Google Search works). It has no feed, so it won’t put your latest job in front of people who aren’t looking. It needs updating, and the domain needs renewing: Nominet notes that a registrar may suspend a domain and its services if it isn’t renewed on time. If you already have a site, our website health check is a quick place to start.

What Facebook still does well

For a lot of local businesses, Facebook is where customers already are. Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report found Facebook and Messenger were used by 93% of UK online adults in May 2025, averaging 42 minutes a day, and the Facebook app reached 63% of them daily. Of the top ten social media platforms, Facebook and Messenger had the highest proportion of users aged 55 and over.

Ofcom’s Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report 2026 found Facebook was the only platform it asked about that was more popular with social media users aged 75+ (81%) than with 16 to 24-year-olds (55%). If your customers are older, that matters.

Word of mouth is built in, too. People can recommend a business on its Page or in the comments when a friend asks for suggestions (Meta notes it doesn’t check they actually used the service). Add messaging, photos and local groups, and Facebook is a genuinely useful channel. It’s just a poor choice for your only home online.

Which matters more for your business?

The website comes first in each case. What changes is how much work Facebook does alongside it.

• Trades and services people search for (electricians, plumbers, roofers, cleaners): the website carries most of the weight, because it’s what you can build to show up when someone searches for the job and the town. Keep a Page for photos and recommendations.
• Word-of-mouth businesses with older or very local customers (cafés, salons, clinics, village shops): Facebook may bring in plenty of enquiries, so keep it active. The website is where your hours, prices, booking details and contact information live for anyone checking you out after a recommendation.
• Just starting out with no budget: a Page and a Google Business Profile cost nothing and will get you going. Get a website on your own domain as soon as you can.

Be clear-eyed about Google as well. A Google Business Profile is also on someone else’s platform, and profiles can be suspended. Your website is the one piece you own.

How to use both: website as your base, Facebook as a signpost

Here’s a made-up example. Sam runs a mobile dog-grooming van. A customer shares Sam’s before-and-after photos on Facebook, and a friend sees them, searches Sam’s business name, lands on the website, checks the areas covered and books through the form. Facebook started the conversation; the website finished it.

To set that up:

1. Register the domain in your business’s name, with an email address you’ll always have. Not your web designer’s, and not an old employee’s. For a .uk domain, that’s the address Nominet uses to contact the legal owner, and you’ll need it to manage the domain.
2. Put your core information on the website first (services, areas, hours, prices if you publish them, contact details), then share it on Facebook.
3. Link your Page to your website, in the Page’s details and in posts when there’s more to read or something to book.
4. Put your website in your Google Business Profile’s website field. Google has a separate “Social profiles” section for Facebook, but its social links help page says these are only “available in select regions”, so you may not see it. Our Google Business Profile set-up guide covers the fields.
5. Give customers ways to reach you that you control: a phone number, email address and enquiry form on the website, as well as Facebook messages.

If you keep a Page, protect it

• Give full control to at least two people you trust, and remove anyone who has left. A Page with nobody in full control gets deactivated, and a second person means one lost account doesn’t lock you out.
• Secure the personal accounts behind the Page. Meta’s own hacked-Page example is someone stealing a password, logging into a personal account, adding themselves to the Page and removing your access.
• Know the recovery route. Meta’s hacked-Page form works when you’re logged in and have recently lost access. Meta aims to reply within a day, but acts only “if we can confirm that the Page was compromised”. For a hacked personal account, start at facebook.com/hacked on a device you’ve logged in from before.

Common questions

Can a Facebook Page be considered a website?

Not really. A Page is a presence on Facebook’s platform, with Facebook’s layout, rules and address. You’re a tenant, not the owner.

What is the difference between a website and a Facebook Page?

Ownership and control. With a domain in your name, the website’s address is yours. On Facebook you keep your content, but Meta sets the rules, decides who sees your posts and can take Pages down.

Which is better for business, a website or Facebook?

The website should be your base because it’s the part you own. Facebook is often better at reaching people who already know you. Use both, with Facebook pointing to the website.

Do I really need a website for my small business?

If you want a presence that doesn’t depend on another company’s rules, and a way to show up for searches about your services and area, yes. It needs looking after and won’t rank just because it exists.

Why are people no longer using Facebook?

Most people still are: Ofcom found 93% of UK online adults used Facebook or Messenger in May 2025. What’s changed is how people use social media: Ofcom’s 2026 report found posting and commenting fell from 61% to 49% in a year.

Where to start

If a Facebook Page is your only home online, the next step is a straightforward website on your own domain, with Facebook pointing people to it. Get Found is a local SEO, AI SEO and web design agency with 22 years’ experience, based at 39 Foregate Street in Worcester with an office in Stockport, working across the UK with no long contracts. Our web design team builds fast, search-ready sites with local SEO and AI search built in, quoted after a free audit. You own the domain and the website we build for you, so if you ever move on, they go with you. If your current site is doing its job, we’ll tell you rather than sell you a new one.

Our free visibility audit checks how you show up on Google, Maps and the main AI tools, or you can get in touch.