Do I need a website for my business in 2026?

A website is not a legal requirement, and it will not bring in work on its own. Its job is narrower: it is where people check you out once they have heard your name.

Think about how work reaches you. A neighbour recommends you. Someone sees your van. A customer finds you on the map or on Instagram. In our experience, most of those people look you up before they pick up the phone. What they find decides whether they call you or the next name on the list.

So a more useful question is this: "when someone looks me up, what do they find, and does it make them want to call?" If the honest answer is “nothing”, or “a Facebook page I last posted on two years ago”, a small, clear website is usually worth having.

It helps to separate two jobs: being found, and being chosen. Profiles and listings are good at the first. A website is usually better at the second, because it has room to show your work, set expectations on price and answer the doubts that stop people ringing.

Most owners already have at least one of these. Each does a different job, and the main difference between them is who is in charge.

Every option except the website is rented space. That is fine, and often useful: an Instagram or TikTok account full of finished jobs is good proof. But if a platform changes its rules, fees or layout, you have no say. A website is the one piece you own, and the others work better when they point to it, with your web address in every bio.

Ownership depends on how the site is built and who built it. Our guide to who owns your website explains how to check.

For many local searches, your Google Business Profile is the first thing people see. If you only do one thing this week, set up your profile properly.

Google says local results are mainly based on three things: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance (how far you are from the person searching) and prominence, which its page also calls popularity (how well known you are). Prominence draws on information such as how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. Google also says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Our guides to how Google Business Profiles work and local SEO basics go further.

A profile can list your services, and Google’s services help says you can add a description and a price to each. What it does not give you is room or control. Google sets the layout, and a short entry per service is not a page that shows that job in photos, explains what affects the price and answers the worries that stop people ringing. The profile gets you noticed. The website is where they decide.

Not for a profile or for reviews. For most Google Ads, yes. Google’s own help pages answer each part:

• A Business Profile: no website needed. Google Ads Help says "Businesses without a website can verify their business with Business Profile". The sign-up steps ask for your name, category, location or service area, phone number and website address, and the profile editing page describes a website as something you “can share”. Listing on Google is free.
• Google reviews: no website needed. Reviews sit on your Business Profile. Google’s tips to get more reviews suggest asking customers to “visit a Google link or scan a QR code”, and say customers must be signed in to a Google Account to leave one. Google also says offering incentives for reviews “is strictly prohibited”.
• Google Ads: usually yes. Google defines the final URL as "the URL address of the web page in your website that people reach after they click your ad", also known as the landing page, and you set one for each ad you create. The exception Google names is that businesses without a website can advertise with Smart campaigns, using their Business Profile.

So the free parts of Google work without a website. The website earns its place one step later: someone reads your reviews, then taps through to see your work, your prices and the areas you cover. And if you pay for adverts, the page people land on decides whether the click turns into a call.

More people now ask ChatGPT, Google’s AI answers or a voice assistant for a recommendation, which has led some owners to wonder whether websites are necessary any more.

Those tools can only use what they can find. Google finds pages by following links and reading sitemaps. If your services, areas and prices are written clearly on your own site, there is something accurate to find. If the only trace of you is a few social posts, there is much less.

What helps is simple: services written out as words that can be read, with nothing important locked inside a photo; the areas you cover named; accreditations in plain text; and the same name, address and phone number on your site and every profile.

Most small service businesses can do a lot with a handful of pages. If you are starting from nothing, this is the list we would work to:

1. What you do and where, in the first screen, in plain words. “Boiler repairs and servicing in Stockport” beats “Welcome to our website”.
2. One page per main service, so a customer looking for that job finds a page about that job.
3. Proof: photos of real work and real reviews. Never stock photos passed off as your own.
4. A rough idea of price, even a “from” figure, so the right customers call and the wrong ones do not.
5. One obvious way to get in touch that works on a phone: a number that dials with one tap and a short form.
6. An email address on your own domain, such as info@yourbusiness.co.uk, rather than a Gmail or Hotmail address. It looks established on a quote or a van, and it stays yours if you change email provider. Owning the domain is the first step to both this and a website.
7. The places you cover, written out in words as well as shown on a map.
8. Your legal details. A limited company’s website must show its registered number, its registered office address, where it is registered (England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland) and that it is a limited company, usually through its full name with “Limited” or “Ltd”. GOV.UK lists all four. Privacy information, for any business, sole traders included: if the site collects personal details, for example through a contact form, the ICO says you must give people privacy information at the time you collect their data. A privacy notice on the site does that, and the ICO has a free tool to create one.

Then put the address everywhere: your Google profile, your van, your cards, your quotes. Google’s own starter guide suggests listing your site’s address on business cards, letterheads and posters.

Costs range from about £9 a month plus VAT for a DIY builder to several thousand pounds for an agency build. Our guide to website costs breaks down every line, and what web designers charge in the UK covers paying someone to build it. But the real question is which site wins the job when a customer has your name and two others open on their phone.

A DIY site can win that comparison if you have the time and the knack: clear words, real photos, prices and a number that dials with one tap. Where DIY sites tend to lose, in our experience, is the words: they describe the business and leave the customer’s worries unanswered.

Coltura's fixed-price build is the Growth Website, £1,400, which you own. That includes working out how to explain your business and writing the copy, as well as the design and build. It takes about 14 working days of build once we have agreed the direction and you have got us your content.

An illustration only. Say an average job leaves you £300 profit. On the figures in the table, the self-hosted Coltura row costs £1,299.99 more than the DIY row over three years (£1,639.97 minus £339.98). That is about 5 jobs over three years, before counting the hours a DIY site takes. If you doubt a clearer site would win 5 jobs you are losing now, choose the DIY row.

The bottom two rows are the same website; the difference is who looks after it. Growth Care covers hosting, security, backups, monitoring and content changes within a fair monthly allowance. At £149 a month it costs more than a cheap DIY plan or many pay-monthly websites, and it is optional: cancel any time, with a month's notice. If you are happy to look after hosting yourself, the self-hosted row is a real choice. Our guide on whether you have to pay monthly for a website sets out the trade-offs, and what a website costs to run each year lists hosting, domain and email prices.

Sometimes the honest answer is no, or not yet. You can probably skip a website, or put it off, if:

• All your work comes from one main contractor or a handful of long-standing customers, and you are not trying to change that.
• You are fully booked months ahead and happy with your prices.
• You are testing an idea. A good Google Business Profile, or a listing site, can be a simpler first step.
• You will not keep it up to date. An abandoned site with old prices and a dead phone number can do more harm than none.

If you want more or better-paid work from people who have never met you, a website usually earns its place. If you have one but it does not appear when people search your name, start with why a website is not showing on Google. If you are unsure whether to fix it or start again, see website redesign vs new website. If it brings in no enquiries, the problem may be the site rather than the idea. A free Growth Audit gives you a written, prioritised list of what is costing you enquiries and what we would do about it, whether or not you go ahead. You can also see sites we have built for other small businesses.