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

The 40-second answer

You can run a business on a Google Business Profile alone, and some do — especially when local competition is light, you have a strong review count, and you're close to most of the people searching. But a profile is a free listing you don't own and can't fully control: Google decides the fields, the public can suggest edits, and a profile can be suspended. A website is space you own outright — full services and pricing, your process, a gallery, FAQs, forms, and the trust signals laid out your way. Google's own local ranking factors reward a profile that links to a real website, so the two work best together: the profile is the front door, the site is the rest of the house. And if your only “website” was the one Google used to build for you, note that Google shut that builder down in 2024 — so you may not have a working site at all. A done-for-you website and domain at $0 closes that gap without a monthly bill.

What a Google Business Profile is great at

Let's give the profile its due, because it's genuinely powerful and every local business should have one fully optimized. It puts you on Google Maps and in the local “map pack,” shows your hours, phone, directions, photos, and reviews, and gives searchers one-tap actions — call, route, message. For a huge share of “near me” searches, that listing is the first and sometimes only thing a customer sees. The vast majority of consumers search online for local businesses, and a well-kept profile captures a lot of that intent for free. If you do nothing else, claim and fill out your profile completely — our 2026 Google Business Profile optimization checklist walks through exactly how.

Where a profile alone leaves money on the table

The limits show up the moment a customer wants more than your hours. A profile has a fixed set of fields Google controls — you can't add a real services menu with descriptions, a pricing page, a detailed portfolio, a process explainer, long-form FAQs, or your own lead form the way you'd want. It can be edited by the public through “suggest an edit,” and it can be suspended — sometimes with little warning — taking your entire visible presence offline at once (we cover recovering from that in our guide to managing your Google reviews and profile). Most of all, it's not yours. You're building on rented land, on terms Google can change. A website is the one piece of your online presence that you own, on a domain that's yours, that no platform can quietly turn off.

The trust gap: found vs. chosen

Finding you and choosing you are two different decisions. A customer might find you on Maps in a second, then immediately want to know more: Do they do my specific service? What does it cost? Are they legit? What do their past jobs look like? A listing answers a sliver of that; a website answers all of it. Most shoppers research online before they buy, and a real website — with clear services, honest pricing context, photos of your work, and visible trust signals — is where that research lands and converts. When there's nowhere to go after the listing, a meaningful share of those ready-to-buy searchers simply bounce to a competitor who does have a site. Our piece on why a real website beats a Facebook page makes the same point about social profiles: borrowed platforms are great for discovery, but they're not where serious buyers get convinced.

Google retired its free Business Profile website builder in 2024

Here's a fact that catches a lot of owners off guard. For years Google let you spin up a basic one-page site straight from your Business Profile, on a business.site address. Google discontinued that builder in 2024. The sites were turned off on March 1, 2024, visitors were redirected to the Business Profile for a short grace period, and after June 10, 2024 those addresses returned a “page not found” error. Google cited low usage and pointed owners to other website builders. The takeaway: if your only website was the Google-built one, you effectively don't have a website now — you have a listing whose “website” link may lead nowhere. That alone is a reason to put a real, owned site in place that can't be switched off by someone else's product decision.

A website actually strengthens your profile

This is the part owners miss when they treat it as “profile or website.” The two reinforce each other. Google's local ranking factors include the website linked to your profile, and a complete profile with a real website generally ranks better than the same profile without one, all else equal. Your site gives Google more relevance and credibility to read — your services, your service area, your content — which can lift the listing itself in the map pack. It's also increasingly how AI search works: answer engines like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity pull from real web pages, so a business with a substantive site has something for them to cite, while a business with only a listing often doesn't. We dig into that in answer engine optimization for local business and why AI recommends your competitor instead of you. Adding LocalBusiness schema to that site makes the connection even cleaner.

So — do you need both? A quick gut check

You might be fine on the profile alone for now if competition in your area is genuinely light, you have a high volume of strong recent reviews, and most of your customers are walk-ins or repeat callers who already know you. You almost certainly want a real website if you're in a competitive market, sell or book online, get asked the same “do you do…?” and “how much…?” questions constantly, want to show your work, or care about showing up in AI answers and the map pack as you grow. For most businesses serious about growth, the practical answer is “both, working together” — and the only real obstacle has always been the cost and hassle of building and maintaining the site.

How to get a real website without the monthly bill

That obstacle is the part we remove. We design, build and host a professional business website for you, with a custom domain, for $750 up front and $99/month — and help connect it to your Google Business Profile so the listing and the site point at each other and reinforce your local ranking. It's the same idea behind our zero-cost processing: take an expense most owners assume is unavoidable and engineer it down to nothing. You can see exactly what's included on the web design page and in our packages, and it pairs with marketing and Google-profile help and our guide to how a website actually grows your business so the site doesn't just exist — it gets found and earns its keep. You can also see how the pieces fit on our web design & Google profile page.