Do you need
a website?

A complete Google Business Profile shows your hours, phone, photos, reviews and services in Search and Maps. For a mobile dog groomer in Wyong booked out by word of mouth, or a new tradie who just needs the phone to ring, that can carry the business for a while. Add a Facebook page and you have most of what a customer checks before calling.

Plenty of businesses run this way. A 2019 YouGov Galaxy survey for GoDaddy found 59% of Australian small businesses had no website, and the most common reason given was that the business was too small. It's an old survey paid for by a company that sells websites, so read it as a sign of how common this is, not a current count.

A profile lives on someone else's platform, under their rules. Google used to offer free websites built from Business Profiles. It turned them off from 5 March 2024, redirected visitors to the profile until 10 June 2024, and then the addresses stopped working. Businesses that relied on them had to start again.

The same goes for a Facebook page or a marketplace listing: useful, but not yours. A website on your own domain is the one place where you control the words, the prices and the address people remember.

If two or more of these are true, a simple site is usually worth having:

• People compare before they call: prices, services, finishes, menus, before and after photos.
• You offer more than a handful of services, and each one is searched for differently.
• You run, or plan to run, ads. A paid click needs somewhere specific to land.
• You want AI tools to describe you correctly. ChatGPT search can only show sites that allow its OAI-SearchBot crawler, and Google's AI features draw on indexed pages.
• You take bookings, sell online or want enquiries in writing, not only calls.

Part one asks whether you need a website yet. Part two checks whether you own the one you have. Nothing you tick leaves your browser.

It doesn't need to be big. It needs to answer, on a phone, the five things a stranger checks: who you are, what you do, where you work, why they should trust you, and how to take the next step. Tap-to-call and a short form beat a contact page with only an email address.

Beyond that: a page for each main service (the SEO page explains why), your own photos, and the details that stop the 'do you do...?' calls. If your business is covered by the Privacy Act, which includes health service providers of any size, the site also needs a privacy policy that explains what it collects. The web design page covers speed and the build itself.

In .au you don't buy a domain, you license it. auDA's rules say the registrant holds a licence to use the domain, for 1 to 5 years, and the registrant must have an Australian presence. Whoever is listed as registrant controls the name. If that's your web developer or a marketing agency, leaving them can mean losing your address.

Checking takes a minute. auDA's WHOIS lookup shows the registrant's legal name and ID, usually an ABN or ACN, and the registrar. Then make sure you have your own logins for the registrar, the hosting and the site's editor, and that renewal notices go to an email you read.

Watch for letters that look like renewal invoices from a company you've never dealt with. In an ACCC case, two companies sent about 300,000 notices that looked like renewals but were offers to register new domains, and were penalised $1.95 million. Only pay renewals through the registrar you actually use.