Do you actually need a website, or is your Facebook page enough?

You may not need a website as urgently as someone selling them will tell you — but you do need a findable home that you own, and a Facebook page is not it. Those are two different claims, and the gap between them is where the real answer sits.

Start with what Facebook does well. It is free, nearly every South African is already on it, and it is excellent for staying in front of existing patients — a renovation photo, a festive-season notice, a friendly face. If your page is active and your reviews are current, you are already ahead of many practices. So this is not "Facebook bad, website good."

The trouble is what Facebook cannot do. You do not own it: the reach of your posts is rationed by an algorithm you don't control, a page can be suspended or hacked with no recourse, and everything you have built sits on rented ground. It is also not where a stranger looks for a dentist. When someone in your town needs one, they don't open Facebook and search — they open Google, or Maps, and what shows up there is businesses and websites, not Facebook pages. A patient who has never heard of you will rarely find you through your page at all.

A website answers both of those: it is the one place online you own outright, and it is what Google shows the stranger who is deciding. But a neglected website is not automatically better than a lively Facebook page. A site last touched in 2019, slow on a phone, with a contact form nobody answers, can do you more harm than a good page would. The question was never "website or Facebook." It is "do I have a findable, current, owned home that does its job?"

Which brings up the one thing that beats both for simply being found, and costs nothing:

The three front doors, and what each is for

Your Google Business Profile — the free map listing. This is what a stranger sees first when they search, and it does more to get you found than your website or your Facebook page. If you do only one thing, claim and tidy this.
Your website — the ground you own, and where a researching patient decides whether to book. It has to load fast, work on a phone, and give an easy way to reach you. Its job is to convert the person the listing sent.
Your Facebook page — for staying in mind with people who already know you, and showing the practice's character. Its job is to nurture, not to be found by strangers.

In the practices I audit, the ones leaning on Facebook alone share a quiet problem: search their town on Google and they barely surface, because there is no website and no tended listing for Google to rank. The patients they are missing are the ones who never knew to look them up by name.

So the order, if budget is tight, is this: claim your free Google Business Profile first — it outperforms both a website and a Facebook page at getting you found. Then build a simple, current website as the owned home the listing points to. Facebook is the third priority, not the first. You may not need an expensive site tomorrow. You do need to stop building your house on land you don't own.

When you are ready for that owned home, a fast, simple one is what I build — but the free listing is yours to claim this afternoon, with or without me.

— Paul