Ask HN: Do SMBs still care about their websites?

I do. It is happening everywhere in Brazil. Small companies see no reason in keeping a stand alone website with very low visit figures whereas their fanpages, profiles in massive social networks leverage engaged visitors. I can see many companies not renewing their domain names registrations simply because it does not matter to have a domain name. Custom branded email address? Pointless, since all comms are made inside the social network.

I know a small company that shut down it's Facebook page while keeping it's website (an old one, from 2005). Probably because it's not selling directly to it's end-customers, so the web site is focused on contact info (for store chains etc) + static web pages with product information. B2B doesn't seem to use Facebook very much at all.

Only a few samples, but:

- Restaurants seem to keep them up. They need to post menus, and links to OpenTable and other reservation sites.

- K-12 Schools keep their own sites

- Other small businesses (martial arts schools, dry cleaners, etc) seem to be leaving their old sites on standby. Big drop in forum activity.

I've seen this. Google's changes to search over the years have made it increasingly difficult for an SMB website to show up in organic searches. Google seems to be biased towards big national brands in a way that they weren't in the past. That, of course, led to more bidding for AdWords, which drove the pricing up there.

So, SMB owners then try to find some other way to get a presence, many of which make it difficult to use your own website. Facebook, for example, is setup in a way where your FB biz page is highlighted, but the url to your actual site is obscured and buried.

Aside from your examples of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter...I've also seen SMB's move their ecommerce sales to Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and the like.

I have seen this happen a few times. Sometimes businesses switch to turnkey/template sites, but if all they need is an address in Google Maps it isn't necessary a lot of the time.

Conversely, as a web developer, I have stopped working with this segment completely. Non-tech organizations of 1-2 people are way more hassle to deal with than larger organizations.

curious about things like thumbtack and homeadvisor for small service businesses.

I've heard of business using those as alternatives to their own websites. To me I'd much rather own my own website site, but I think I'm in the minority.

In my, completely unscientific but likely not that all inaccurate, observation SMBs are pushing hard on Facebook. Twitter is dead and people don't waste their money adversiting there. Google is still there but it's become such a mess that the difficultly of getting high rankings combined with the much less precise targeting (compared to say Facebook) has made it a lot less attractive recently.

It probably depends if you use your website to generate income.

I currently work for a small business that sells dedicated lines, MPLS etc. They invest heavily in their website and use it to generate leads for the sales team.

Myself, on the other hand, I switched from a Wordpress powered blog to a simple, html "About me" website, mainly because I didn't use it and didn't want to keep up with the maintenance.

I can understand if smaller companies, that need nothing more than a business card on the web, use Facebook or some other hosted service for their presence.

Not in my case, our website is VERY important.

I opened an escape room business in Idaho about 3 months ago, and we have a website, facebook page, google (+,mybusiness,etc), twitter, and instagram account.

Our website is so important because it's how we connect people to our booking system, and for ranking in Google and we link our Adwords account to it as well.

Then we send people to our website first and on our business cards, promo materials, signs, and more, because it has our FAQ, email contact form, photos, the format we want, Book Now link, the message we want at the top, details about our services, and more.

I couldn't imagine just trying to manage all this with just a Facebook page or Google stuff. People would be very confused.

If I said, just got to our Facebook page, you'd be surprised at how many people say they aren't on Facebook. If I say go to our Google+ page they don't even know what I'm talking about. People call all the time to book because they say "I don't do the Internet thing" (not kidding)

Asking people for reviews is easiest through Facebook. I don't even know how to tell people to review me on Google. Not many folks here appear to be on Yelp it seems. But having a "Review us on..." section of our website will be nice when I add it, and then again, I can just send people to the site.

Lastly, the website is where I can put company specific information like our downloadable flyer, rules and regulations, orientation info, faq, specific details about each of our rooms, some player stats, and official info about our promotions.

So yes, a website for a small business is extremely important in my opinion.

That being said, I have heard of people just going to a Facebook Page, but I believe these are people who don't see the value in connecting EVERY aspect of the web to maximize their online exposure, and don't see the benefits they could reap if they use all these tools together effectively.

For most non tech SMBs a website was a necessary evil, like all advertising. Then they get caught up in an SEO scam or two and talking of promotion or online advertising is like suggesting tax fraud.

Google could have dreamed up an Adwords Lite for SMBs and stop defaulting to broad match. If done well it could have made Adwords worthwhile for those who can't just hire an adwords consultant and spend 4 figures. I know several SMBs who would never touch Adwords again. The two I know who use adwords well both have someone pretty technical around. One of those does more on Etsy than their site.

As @tyingq says Google's updates have mostly promoted brands and large businesses. Now add the freshness updates and they're hurting all the mainly static small sites. Facebook did much the same when they hugely cut the views pages can achieve. FB went from hugely helpful to almost a waste of time for many.

It's little wonder so many aren't seeing the point.

I've seen and have encouraged small business to move their web presence to Facebook and Google Local Business.

We've built a solid amount of websites for small businesses, and in most cases they don't care about maintenance. So in the end they spent a solid amount on a website and hosting, don't change anything for four years and build a new site. Having gained nothing in between.

Having a Facebook page doesn't cost you anything, and on the plus side, if you maintain it you will get free exposure by appearing alongside organic posts on users' timelines. You'll have to work for your likes, but it's your responsibiliy to provide fresh and interesting content. The more users engage with your posts, the more visibility you will get as well.

Twitter seems to be mainly for support and quick updates when you have service problems and Instagram is nice if you have something more in the graphics or design sector. In my country it's also mostly used by geeks and doesn't work if you want to reach a general crowd.

However, as a customer it all depends on what I'm looking for. Want a new tap for the kitchen sink? I'm not going to look for that on Facebook, you'd best have a website with some examples and pricing. If I want to go to a restaurant I only care about their contact information and the menu. If I can find that on Facebook or the Google sidebar, I'm happy.

Context: I own a CrossFit gym with my wife which happens to be the largest (both in physical size and active membership) in an ~80-100 mile radius. I also have a full-time job developing applications for enterprise and government clients and I used to be a full-time freelancer focusing on custom websites and custom WordPress plugins.

Our website is invaluable. We have all our ad landing pages there so it's a constant source of warm local leads. I think it's grown in importance since we tightened the integration with Facebook and Instagram. We don't really do much search/display advertising, it's all social proof, boosted posts, ads to get people to our events, "people whose friends have liked our page," etc.

If the website's importance is 10/10 I'd put Facebook at an 8 and Instagram at a 5. I'd take simple website + solid FB ad strategy over flashy website + leaky bucket ad strategy 100% of the time.

I had actually spent a lot of time researching this particular use case - creating and maintaining website as B2C SMB and their way of promoting themselves to customers. I came to the conclusion that if you are mortar-and-brick business, focused on local people, the current web is actually totally broken for you and the only feasible solution for ads are location based ad systems.

In this particular case I distinguished between businesses which are location based and businesses which are able to sell their goods and services on the Internet. For those who are able to sell on Internet, there is plenty of options for e-commerce solution etc, but for local businesses it doesn't make economically sense to maintain website.

During my research I talked with 50 local small-business owners in SF and each one of them had website. They all agreed that it is luxurious expense and half of them had problem to maintain the site and only 10/50 were able to update their website at least once a month. What was kind of shocking for me to find out was that around 60% of these people was paying $50+/month for shitty website and almost nobody was willing to spend more money on their website.

When asking about social media(Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp) - 95% had profiles there and were actually having them more updated than their business websites. Unfortunately, majority of the owners were pretty skeptic about the advertisement there and never tried, for example, targeted FB ads. Most of them never heard about this option.

Here is couple of findings:

- When asking, why do they have a website, some of them replied that it is must have in eyes of the customer - you don't exist if you don't have website, right?

- When asking what's their monthly number of visitors on their websites, 60% didn't know.

- When asking about the most used communication channel, almost everyone said phone. One barber was actually running WhatsApp group and worked pretty well for him.

- When asking how much they will be investing into a website - the majority said that they will not increase their costs for web and ads.

From my point of view, web is actually total nonsense for local businesses, it's unnecessary expense and the owners could do much better if they orient on social media and local advertisement. The real problem for them is that they are not willing to maintain 10 social network accounts and constantly update them, because they need to run their real business as well.

One funny thing I found out was that 10 out of 50 said that old-fashioned promotional flyer into mailbox still works best for them and has the biggest response and they will spent more money on that. Kinda surprise for me in SF in the beginning of 2016.

Sorry, it would be nice if someone could explain what "SMB" means. To me, it's a network file sharing protocol, and a basic Google search confirms this as the top definition.

Yup I've witnessed the same migraion... food stalls like The Poutinerie are facebook / twitter only.

I would've expected a website 5 years ago, but they seem fine.

Google "The Poutinerie" and their 'website' comes up top billing ( London based peep )

I used to work for an online booking company that supplied its SMBs with a business profile page, Facebook widget, website widget and reputation management. Almost universally, they all felt that their website was very important and spent an inordinate amount of money on it...some well into the 6-figures, which was much more than they spent on our service. However, also almost universally, they'd get almost no bookings through the website widgets. Customers overwhelmingly preferred dealing with them through Facebook and our business profile page. Also, our business profile pages showed up much higher in Google for non-name searches.

I'm sure there are some SMBs that really do have a need for a website and it really is important to them, but for the verticals that we dealt with, there was a huge perception gap between the perceived and actual value of the website and a profound misunderstanding of the preferences of their customers. The question of whether SMBs still care about their websites is, to me, less interesting than the question of whether SMBs should care about their websites.

cool

During an "Entrepreneurship" class, some classmates started investigating about SMBs web presence.. and yes, a LOT of SMBs find their Facebook page to be a lot more valuable than their website, often forgoing the website.

It's been a lot worse for them since Facebook started asking for money in order to promote posts, but the ease of use and features of Facebook coupled with an audience beat a website hands down.

Companies included home cooking / office meals, small design and deco items sales, nail polish and beauty supplies, even a general hardware store.

I do think a website is important, but a Facebook page even more so.

Another huge channel here is WhatsApp.