Do I need a website for my business?

What a Google Business Profile can and cannot do

A Google Business Profile is a discovery tool. It gets you found in local searches and on Maps. It shows your hours, your photos and your reviews. For many trades businesses, it is the single most important digital asset they have — and it is free.

What it cannot do: explain your services in depth, capture a structured enquiry, tell the story of your business, show your pricing, or give a potential customer the confidence that comes from reading a proper service page. When someone finds you on Google and taps through, they expect a website. What they often find is a thin profile and a phone number — and that is the moment you lose them to someone with a site.

What word of mouth actually needs from your website

Word of mouth is powerful — but it relies on the receiver being ready to act on it immediately. If someone is recommended your business and looks you up the next day, they are going to search your name. What they find is either a professional site that confirms the recommendation, or nothing — or worse, an outdated Facebook page.

A website does not replace word of mouth. It validates it. The referral creates intent; the website closes it. A business that has strong word of mouth and no website is leaving conversions on the table every week.

Where marketplaces and lead sites fit — and where they quietly cost you

Two different things get lumped together here. Booking marketplaces like Booksy, Treatwell and Fresha put you in front of people browsing for a service. Lead sites like Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark sell you an enquiry, often the same enquiry they have sold to several competitors, so you win it on speed and price or not at all.

Both are genuinely good at one thing: reaching strangers. Someone who has never heard of your business, browsing at nine on a Sunday evening, is demand you would not otherwise have seen, and paying for that is a fair trade.

The expensive habit is routing your own traffic through them. When the link in your social bio, the QR code on your van and the button in your ads all point at a marketplace profile, you have paid to create that interest and then delivered it to a page that lists your competitors underneath you, sorted by price and availability. You pay to generate the lead, pay again when it converts, and the customer belongs to the platform either way — so the next reminder they get may well be about someone else.

The fix is not to cancel anything. Leave the listing exactly where it is and let it keep doing the job it is good at. Change where your own links point: bio, ads, van, invoices, business cards and email signature all go to your own site and your own booking or quote form. After that you are paying the platform only for strangers, which is the only thing it was ever worth paying for.

When a website is not yet the right move

Honest answer: there are moments when a website is not the priority. If you are testing a new business idea and still validating whether there is demand, a Google Business Profile and a social presence may be enough to start. If you are fully booked through personal referrals and have no capacity for new work, a site adds little short-term value.

For most businesses, though, that window closes quickly. Once you want to grow beyond your existing network — or once you want enquiries to arrive without making calls yourself — the absence of a website becomes the constraint.

What kind of website do trades and local businesses actually need?

Not a complicated one, and — this is the part most agencies will not tell you — not one that needs building from scratch. A well-built site for a local trades business does four things: it confirms you are credible and professional; it explains what you do and who you serve; it shows your service area; and it makes it easy to get in touch or request a quote. Those requirements are near-identical from one trade to the next, which is exactly why paying several thousand pounds to have them designed from nothing rarely makes sense.

That is what the Local Business Website is for: from £395 setup plus £49 per month, you go live on a system already built for your trade and branded to your business. It also covers the part a brochure site never touches — tracking your customers, your jobs and your staff — which for most trades is worth considerably more than the website itself.

The temptation is to overthink the site. A clean, mobile-first page with a clear enquiry form outperforms a bloated, template-heavy one. The goal is not to win a design award; it is to turn a curious searcher into an enquiry, and then to not lose the job once it lands.

How to see what your website could look like before you commit

The Social Spark live preview is designed for exactly this moment. Answer a short brief about your business — what you do, who you serve, what you want the site to achieve — and it generates custom website concepts in minutes. It is a direction to explore, not a template, and it is free to try before any money changes hands.

If after seeing a direction you want to understand the cost, the pricing page breaks it down. Most local and trades businesses land on the Local Business Website — £395 setup with your existing branding, £795 if you want a new brand created, then £49 per month. A custom build designed from scratch starts from £2,500 on the Website Starter route.

The question to ask yourself

"If a potential customer searched my business name right now, what would they find — and would it make them more or less likely to get in touch?"

If the answer is "nothing", "an old Facebook page", or "a site I built myself on a free platform five years ago", then a website is not a nice-to-have. It is the gap between your reputation and your revenue.