Is a Facebook page enough for my business, or do I need a website?

A Facebook page is good at what it does: reaching people who already follow you, quickly, for nothing. Nobody should close one to make a point.

What it is not is yours. The address, the layout, what can be posted and who may read it are all set by the platform, and they can change without asking you. A website is the one place online where you decide all of those things.

So the useful question is not Facebook or a website. It is whether the facts a new customer needs, what you do, where, when and how to reach you, exist anywhere that you control and that anything can read.

There is a quieter reason too. A post scrolls away: last month’s update about winter hours is soon buried under this week’s photos, and a customer, or a machine, looking for the current hours has to dig for it. A page on a website stays where you put it, at the same address, until you change it.

A site can publish a robots.txt file saying which automated readers may visit which parts. We fetched Facebook’s and Instagram’s on 8 November 2026. Both open with the same notice: collecting data from them by automated means is prohibited without express written permission, and any crawler they list must comply with Meta’s Automated Data Collection Terms.

Both files then shut out several AI crawlers by name, from the whole site: OpenAI’s GPTBot, Anthropic’s ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended among them. Search crawlers such as Googlebot, Bingbot and Applebot get their own sections, with only some paths closed. And both files end with a rule for every crawler they do not name: keep out of everything.

So on that date, a crawler had to be on Meta’s list to read anything at all, and the AI crawlers named were told to keep out entirely. Those files will change; fetch them yourself before relying on any of this. Our guide on AI crawlers and robots.txt explains which crawler does which job.

Think of the Facebook page as a stall in someone else’s market. It is busy, it costs nothing, and the market sets the rules: the opening hours, who comes in, and what the stall can look like. A website is a shop with your name over the door. Fewer people walk past, but you decide what is in the window and who may look.

That difference matters most to the readers who are not people. On your own site, your robots.txt says what crawlers may read, and you can welcome the ones that feed search answers. On Facebook, Meta has already decided, for every page at once.

An invented example: a café in Aberaeron posts its winter hours on Facebook every October. A visitor asks an assistant whether it is open on a Tuesday in November. The assistant cannot read the post, finds an old listing instead, and gets it wrong. One page on the café’s own site, with the hours written out, would have given it the right answer.

None of this is a complaint about Meta, which states its rules plainly at the top of both files. It simply means the facts you most need people to find should also live somewhere the rules are yours.

Not much. One page can be enough, if it says in words what you do, where, your opening hours, your prices or how to get a quote, and how to get in touch, in Welsh and English if you work in both. That is the page a search engine, an assistant or a new customer can read.

Then link the two together. Put the website address on the Facebook page, and a link to the Facebook page on the website, so a reader can move between them and a machine can tell they are the same business.

It also helps Facebook. Meta’s documentation says its crawler, FacebookExternalHit, reads a website when someone shares a link to it on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger, and builds the preview from its title, description and image. A site with those set gets a proper card every time someone shares it.

The risk with two places is that they disagree. Decide that the website holds the facts that rarely change, the hours, the services and the address, and that Facebook carries the news. When a fact changes, change the website first and post about it second. Put the website address in the page’s details, and pin a post that links to it.

Do the same for Welsh. If you post in both languages on Facebook, give the website both too, so a Welsh-speaking customer who follows a link from a Welsh post lands on a Welsh page rather than an English one.

Run the free assessment on this site against your website address to see what a machine can read on it, in either language. It reads the page you own; it cannot read the page Meta owns, which is rather the point.