This figure comes from multiple studies over the past decade and it hasn't budged. Whether someone needs a plumber, a restaurant, a photographer, or a lawyer — the first thing they do is search Google.
A Facebook page does not appear in those search results the same way a website does. A Facebook page is a profile on someone else's platform. Google indexes it poorly, ranks it low, and often doesn't show it at all for local searches.
If you don't have a website, you are invisible to 97% of potential customers at the moment they're actively looking for what you sell.
This is the argument I make that lands hardest. When you build your business presence on Facebook, you are building on land you don't own, under rules you didn't write, that can change without warning.
Facebook has reduced organic reach for business pages by over 90% in the past decade. Posts that used to reach all your followers now reach maybe 2–5% of them — unless you pay to boost them.
Your account can be restricted, flagged, or disabled for reasons that are opaque and difficult to appeal. It has happened to real businesses. One morning their entire online presence — reviews, posts, followers, years of content — was gone.
A website is yours. Your domain, your content, your data. No algorithm decides who sees it. No platform policy can take it away.
Let's keep this conservative. Suppose your business is worth an average of $200 per new customer. And suppose that not having a proper website means you miss just one customer inquiry per week that would otherwise have found you on Google.
That's $200 × 52 weeks = $10,400 per year in missed revenue.
A professional website for a small business costs between $500 and $1,500 to build properly. At one missed customer per week, you would break even in the first month and be significantly ahead for the rest of the year.
If your average customer is worth more than $200, or if you're missing more than one per week, the numbers get much larger very quickly.
You don't need an enormous website. Most small businesses need:
- A homepage that clearly explains what you do and who you serve - A services or menu page with accurate pricing or pricing guidance - A contact page with a form, phone number, and email that actually work - Basic SEO — your business name, location, and services in the right places so Google can index you
That's it. Four pages, built properly, loading fast on mobile. That alone puts you ahead of the majority of small businesses in your area.
A clean, professional, mobile-first website built on a modern framework typically costs $500–$1,000 for a small business. It takes 1–2 weeks to build. It will outperform a cheap website builder template because it loads faster, ranks better, and looks more credible.
Hosting costs around $10–$20 per month. Your domain is $10–$15 per year.
If one extra customer finds you per month because of the website, you've paid for the first year of running costs. If it's one per week, you've paid for the build itself.
The question isn't whether you can afford a website. It's how much longer you can afford not to have one.
Ready to take action?