Home›Blog›Do you need a website?

Opinion · Before you spend

You might not need a website

I build websites for a living, so take this with the appropriate scepticism. But a reasonable number of people who contact me would be better served by spending nothing with me at all, and I have come to think saying so is more useful than the alternative. Here is how to tell which group you are in — and the free thing most people should do first regardless.

The usual advice is that every business needs a website. It is repeated so often that nobody checks it, and the people repeating it loudest are, almost without exception, selling them.

The honest version is narrower. Every business needs to be findable, and needs to look legitimate when someone checks up on it. A website is the most flexible way to do both. It is not the only way, and it is not always the cheapest way to start.

Four situations where a website can wait

Your customers find you by walking past

A tea stall, a tailor, a small pharmacy, a barber. Your catchment is a few streets, your customers are repeat, and your reputation travels by conversation. A website changes almost nothing about any of that. A Google Business Profile with your hours, your location and your phone number changes quite a lot — and it is free.

You work entirely through one or two institutional relationships

Some of the most solid businesses in Bangladesh sell to three buyers who have known them for a decade. If your work arrives through a procurement officer who already has your number, a website is not where your next contract comes from. A tidy company profile as a PDF and a professional email address on your own domain may be the whole requirement.

Note that this one expires. It is a strong position until one of those relationships ends, and then the absence of anything findable becomes expensive quickly.

You are still working out what you sell

If you are four months in and the offering has changed twice, a website built now will describe a business that no longer exists by the time it launches. Sell manually first. Take the enquiries on WhatsApp. When you find yourself answering the same three questions in the same order every week, you have discovered your website's content, and building it becomes a much shorter job.

Your entire market lives on one platform

If you sell through Facebook and your customers genuinely do not leave Facebook, a website may sit there receiving nobody. That is a real situation and worth being honest about.

It also carries a risk you should name out loud: you are renting your customer relationships. Reach gets throttled, pages get restricted by mistake, policies change, accounts get hacked. People who have had this happen describe it the same way every time — the business did not shrink gradually, it stopped in an afternoon. That is not a reason to build a site you do not need. It is a reason to own your domain and your customer list even if the site itself can wait.

Five moments when waiting stops making sense

These are the points at which the calculation genuinely flips. Not "it would be nice" — the point at which not having one is costing you money.

1. Someone is checking you out before they call

This is the big one, and it is almost universal now. A buyer gets your name, searches it, and decides whether to bother. If the search returns nothing, or returns a Facebook page with three posts from 2022, you have been judged before you knew you were being considered. This is the moment referrals start leaking without you ever hearing about it.

2. You are explaining the same things over and over

If you spend an hour a day answering the same questions on WhatsApp — what you charge, how long it takes, whether you cover a particular area, what the process is — a website is not marketing. It is a labour cost you are currently paying in person, every single day.

3. People search for what you do, not who you are

If someone could plausibly type "sanitaryware supplier Narayanganj" into Google, there is demand on the table that a Facebook page competes very poorly for. This is where a website earns its keep in a way nothing else replicates.

4. You need to look bigger than you are — honestly

Corporate buyers, tender processes, and overseas importers use the absence of a website as a filter. Not because they think it proves anything, but because it is a quick way to shorten a list. Fair or not, it is the environment.

5. You are about to spend money on advertising

Pointing paid traffic at a Facebook page wastes most of it, because you cannot control the page, cannot structure it around one decision, and cannot see properly what happened. If you are planning to spend on ads, build the destination first. Otherwise you are paying for attention you have nowhere to put.

How to tell, in one question

In the last three months, has anyone decided not to contact me because of what they found — or didn't find — when they looked me up?

If yes, or if you cannot tell, that is your answer

The honest difficulty is that you will never hear about these. Nobody writes to say they checked and were unconvinced. The absence of that feedback is why the question is so easy to postpone indefinitely.

If the answer is "not yet"

Three things worth doing anyway, in order. None of them is a website, and together they cost very little.

1. Buy your domain now. Around ৳1,200 to ৳1,800 a year. Buy it in your own name, with your own card, on your own email. Domains get taken, and the one matching your business name is worth holding years before you build anything on it.
2. Get email on that domain. A real address beats a Gmail one in every negotiation you will ever have, and it costs very little.
3. Set up the Google Business Profile. Free, twenty minutes, and the highest-return thing on this entire page for any business with a location.

That is a serious online presence for the price of a domain and an hour of your time. When the moment comes that you do need a site, you will already own the foundations rather than starting from nothing.

And when you do need one

Build the small honest version. Five or six pages: who you are, what you do, proof you have done it, how to reach you. Done properly, fast on a phone, in your own name, with the domain and hosting under your control.

What I would avoid is the opposite failure — a large site full of pages nobody reads, built because it felt like what a real company has. A five-page site that loads in two seconds and says something specific outperforms a twenty-page one that says nothing, every time.

If you want the real numbers before you talk to anyone, I have published what a website actually costs in Bangladesh, and what the process involves from the owner's side rather than the developer's.

Questions people ask

Isn't a Facebook page basically the same thing now?

For discovery among people already on Facebook, it works. For three other things it does not: you cannot structure it around the decision you want someone to make, you do not control whether your own audience sees your posts, and you have no claim on any of it if access goes wrong. It is a shopfront in a building owned by someone else, on a lease you have never read.

What about the free website builders?

Reasonable for testing an idea. Two things to understand before relying on one. First, the free tier usually puts you on an address like yourname.platform.com, which looks temporary to anyone evaluating you and cannot be moved later without losing whatever search presence it built. Second, some free tiers insert their own advertising onto your pages. If you use one, put your own domain on it from the start.

I have a website and it has never brought me anything. Should I give up on it?

Check whether it is actually visible before concluding it does not work. A site that was never indexed, or that only ranks for your company name, has not been tested — it has been invisible. Ten minutes of checks will tell you which of those you are dealing with, and the answer is often embarrassing in a way that is good news.

How small is too small for a website?

Size is not really the variable. The variable is whether strangers search for what you offer. A one-person accountant whose clients Google "tax consultant Feni" needs one more than a twenty-person factory supplying two long-standing buyers.

Will you tell me if I don't need one?

Yes. It happens, and it is a better outcome for both of us than a project that was never going to pay for itself. Sometimes the answer is a Google Business Profile and a domain, and I say so.