Is a Facebook page enough for a small business?

For some, at the start, yes. If your customers already follow you, your offer is simple, and you are not trying to be discovered by strangers, a well-maintained page does real work. It stops being enough the moment you need to be found by someone who is not already looking for you by name.

What does “rented ground” actually mean?

It means the platform decides how your business appears, who sees it, what sits beside it, and whether the page exists tomorrow. You control the words you post. You do not control the layout, the ranking, the ads next to you, or the account itself.

Yes. Pages are suspended for automated policy matches, admin account compromise, or a departing employee who was the only administrator. There is no statutory right of transfer for a social page. There is one for a domain name — under the ICANN Transfer Policy a registrar may deny a transfer only in enumerated instances and must give a reason [2].

Do AI assistants read Facebook pages?

Far less reliably than they read an open web page. Answer engines quote text they can fetch, parse and attribute. A public page with your hours in an image caption is a poor source; a page on your own domain that states your services, service area and hours in plain text is a good one.

Can I run everything through Messenger instead of a contact form?

You can take enquiries there, but note the compliance detail: CASL requires consent and prescribed information for commercial electronic messages [4], and the Electronic Commerce Protection Regulations only relax the information requirement where it is conspicuously published on the interface through which the message is accessed and the recipient consents [5]. Your profile has to actually carry your identifying and contact information.

Does a website replace my social page?

No, and it should not try. Social is where you show up regularly; the site is where the facts live. Post to social, link to the site, and keep the authoritative version — prices, hours, service area, policies — on ground you own.

What if my customers only use social media?

Then keep posting there. Build the site anyway, cheaply, so that the search result, the AI answer, the invoice footer and the vehicle decal all point somewhere that is yours. The two audiences barely overlap, which is exactly the argument for having both.

What is the minimum a website has to do to be worth it?

State who you are, what you sell, where you serve, what it costs, and how to reach you, in text a machine can read. That is a page or two. It does not require a redesign, a blog, or a content strategy.

Do I Need a Website If I Already Have a Facebook Page?

The sixty-second answer

A Facebook page is real distribution and a fair place to start. It is also rented ground: you do not control how you are displayed, who is shown your page, or whether the account survives a policy flag. Keep the social page. Put the authoritative facts on a domain you own.

Give social media its due first

Any answer that opens by dismissing your Facebook page is not being straight with you. A social page does three things well, and a small website does none of them as easily.

It is where you already are. Setup cost is nothing, the audience arrives with the platform, and the people who follow you get a genuine signal that you are open and active. For a business with an existing local following, a page that posts twice a week beats a beautiful site nobody visits.

It is conversational. Customers message pages the way they text a friend, and that low friction converts. Reviews and comments accumulate socially, which is a form of proof a static page cannot manufacture.

And it is fast. A photo of today's special goes up in thirty seconds. That is a legitimate advantage and no website should pretend otherwise.

So the honest framing is not "website versus social page". It is: which facts about your business can you afford to keep on infrastructure you do not control?

What "rented ground" means in practice

Renting is not an insult. Most businesses rent their premises. The problem is renting without knowing the terms, and the terms of a social page are unusual: they are set unilaterally, they change without notice, and there is no lease.

You do not control how you are represented. The platform decides the layout, which fields are shown, what is truncated, which post is surfaced, and what sits beside you in the feed. Your carefully written service description may be collapsed behind a "see more" link. Your hours may show as an image caption nobody can parse.

You do not control whether you are found. Reach is allocated, not earned once. A page that reliably reached its followers three years ago may reach a fraction of them now, and there is no appeal.

You do not control the account. Pages get suspended by automated policy matching, lost when an admin's personal account is compromised, and orphaned when the only administrator was the co-op student who set it up in 2019. Recovery, when it happens, runs through a support queue.

Compare that with a domain name, where your rights are written down. Under the ICANN Transfer Policy, Registered Name Holders must be able to transfer their domain name registrations between registrars, a Registrar of Record may deny a transfer only in a short list of enumerated instances, must give the reason for a denial, and where a transfer lock has been applied must remove it or provide an accessible removal method within five calendar days [2]. That is not a customer service promise. That is a policy your registrar is bound by. It is the difference between owning and occupying. We walk through it in who owns my website and my domain?.

How you get found is the real split

There are two ways a stranger finds a small business in Canada in 2026: a search result, or an answer from an AI assistant. Both work by reading text that can be fetched, parsed and attributed.

A public web page on your own domain is close to ideal for that. It has a stable address, it can be read without an account, and its structure tells a machine which part is your service area, which part is your price, and which part is your phone number. A social page is a much weaker source: much of it is dynamically rendered, much of the useful detail lives in image captions and comments, and none of the structure is yours to fix. If you want to be the business an assistant names when someone asks who does this work in your town, that is decided by whether the facts exist in readable text somewhere you control. See how do I get AI assistants to recommend my business?.

This matters at scale in Canada specifically. As of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses here, and 1.08 million — 98.2 per cent — were small [1]. Discovery in a market that shape is not won by advertising budget. It is won by being the business whose details are actually legible.

The obligations follow you either way

A common misreading of social platforms is that operating there transfers your legal duties to them. It does not.

Claims you make in a post are representations to the public. Section 74.01(1)(a) of the Competition Act covers representations that are false or misleading in a material respect, and (1)(b) requires performance or efficacy claims to be based on an adequate and proper test, with the proof resting on the person who made the claim [3]. "Best rates in the province" is the same claim whether you post it or print it. More in what can I legally claim on my website?.

Messaging is regulated too. CASL prohibits sending a commercial electronic message unless the recipient has consented, expressly or by implication, and the message complies with the information requirements in subsection 6(2) [4]. The Electronic Commerce Protection Regulations relax those information requirements for messages sent through an electronic messaging service, but only where the required information is conspicuously published on the user interface through which the message is accessed and the person consents to receive it [5]. In plain terms: if you market through direct messages, your profile has to actually carry your identifying and contact information. Our signup-side guide is what does CASL require on a signup form?.

And if you collect any personal information — a name and a phone number in a message thread counts — PIPEDA's Schedule 1 still applies: identify your purposes at or before collection, obtain knowledge and consent, and make your policies readily available to the individuals concerned [6]. A social page gives you nowhere good to publish that policy. A website does, which is why the privacy page tends to be the first thing that forces the issue. See does my small business website need a privacy policy?.

There is an access dimension as well. The Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies among the areas in which barriers are to be identified and removed, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [7]. On your own site you can put real text, labelled fields and ordered headings in place. On someone else's platform you can only work within what they render.

So what should you actually do?

Keep the page. Post to it. Then move five things onto ground you own: your service list, your service area, your prices or price ranges, your hours and contact details, and your policies. Link the social page to the site, not the other way round.

The test is simple. If your page vanished tonight, could a stranger still find you tomorrow, and would they still get the right phone number? If the answer is no, the page is not your marketing — it is your only copy.

Where we sit

A maple.website build starts at $50, covering 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work; beyond that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images are $2 each and extra hours are $40 per hour, quoted in advance. Hosting is $10 CAD per month including SSL, a CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own. All prices CAD; HST extra where applicable. Turnaround is 48 hours from your written brief — see what do I need ready before someone builds my website? — and media can be added at any time afterwards.

We are not asking you to leave social media. We are asking you to stop storing the only copy of your business's facts on a platform that owes you nothing. Post where the people are; keep the record where it is yours.

Do I need a website if I already have a Facebook page?