Do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?

You set up your Google Business Profile, the phone rings a bit more, and now you’re wondering whether a website is worth the money on top of a listing that costs nothing.

The short answer: the profile and the website do different jobs. The profile is how people nearby find you. The website is where they check you out and decide whether to call. Most businesses end up wanting both, but not all, and this guide tries to give you an honest test rather than a pitch — we build websites, and we still tell some people they don’t need one yet.

What the profile does, and does well

A Business Profile is free,³ and it appears exactly where a nearby customer is looking: the map, and the local panel in search results. Google says those local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and how well known a business is² — so a complete, accurate profile with real reviews earns its place without a website behind it.

For a lot of trades, that’s the whole funnel: someone searches “barber near me”, sees you’re 400 yards away, open now, 4.6 stars, and taps to navigate. No website was ever consulted.

What the profile can’t do

The panel is Google’s page, not yours. You choose the facts; Google chooses the layout, the neighbors, and what fits. There’s no room for a full price list presented your way, no long story about how you work, no gallery arranged to show your best jobs first, no page for the question your customers actually ask on the phone.

And there’s a harder fact: the free website Google used to attach to profiles is gone. For years Google would generate a little website from your profile. In March 2024 it turned those off, redirecting visitors to the profiles instead, and the redirects stopped working on June 10, 2024 — after that, anyone following an old link hit a page that didn’t exist.¹ Google told businesses to build a real website somewhere else. People still search “google website for my business”; that door closed in March 2024.

When a profile alone is enough

Say it plainly, because most sellers of websites won’t: plenty of businesses don’t need one.

• You’re fully booked from word of mouth and regulars, and turning work away.
• You’re a walk-in trade — a Laundromat, a corner shop — where the only questions are where you are and when you’re open.
• You publish nothing — no prices, no menu, no portfolio — because the work is priced on sight.
• You would not keep a website current, and a stale website is worse than none.

If that’s you, spend the effort on the profile itself: accurate hours, fresh photos, review replies. That’s the highest-return work available to you, and it’s free.

When the website earns its keep

The pattern in the other direction is just as clear. You need a website when customers compare before they call:

• You have prices, a menu or packages people want to see in full, at their own pace, before they drive over.
• You do work people check out — renovations, cakes, inspections, events — where the photos and the list of what’s included close the deal.
• You want to own an address on the internet. A domain is yours; a listing sits on rented ground. One of our clients, a barbershop that had been on the same street for fifteen years, put its price board on its own domain — an address that stays his whatever any platform does next.
• Email at your own domain matters to you — quotes from info@yourbusiness read differently than quotes from a Gmail account.
• You want to be findable for more than “near me” — for the service you sell, the question you answer, the town you serve.

There’s also the quiet one: a profile can be suspended, and a business with nothing else goes dark overnight. A website is the thing you still control when that happens.

What it costs, honestly

The profile is free.³ The website is where the ranges start:

• Doing it yourself on a builder looks cheap in year one and runs a few hundred dollars a year once the promotional pricing ends, every year, for as long as the site lives.
• Hiring runs from a few hundred dollars for a one-pager to several thousand for a designed multi-page site, before ongoing upkeep.
• With us it’s $500 for a one-page site or $800 for up to five pages, paid once, with the first year of the domain included and $15 a year after. Care, at $49 a month, is optional.

We keep the full comparison — builder renewals, freelancer rates, maintenance — in a separate guide with every figure sourced: How much does a website cost?

The test we’d apply

Pretend a customer found you this morning. She has your panel open. What does she still want to know before she calls — and can the panel hold the answer?

If it can, stop here, and put an hour into your profile instead.

If it can’t — there’s a price list, a menu, a portfolio, a question that needs half a page — that’s what a website is for. It doesn’t need to be fancy. One honest page with your prices, your photos and your phone number answers the woman from this morning, and it belongs to you.