Do you need a website if you already have a Facebook page?
Sometimes the answer is no, and anyone who tells you otherwise is usually selling you one. Here is how to tell which side you are on.
Sometimes the answer is no, and anyone who tells you otherwise is usually selling you one. Here is how to tell which side you are on.
Plenty of centres in the Klang Valley run entirely on a Facebook page and do perfectly well. If someone tells you that you absolutely must have a website, they are usually selling you one. So here is the honest version.
If all four are true, a website will not change much this year. Fix your Google listing instead, which costs less and does more, and spend the difference somewhere else.
A parent who already knows your name can find your Facebook page. A parent typing “tuition centre near Seksyen 7” into Google usually cannot. Facebook pages rank poorly for that kind of local search, and that search is where new parents come from rather than existing ones.
Everything you have published is in reverse order, mixed together, and scrolls away. A parent trying to find out whether you run Saturday morning classes has to scroll a feed and guess. The information exists; it is just not somewhere it can be read.
This one is more common than it sounds. Auditing centres across the Klang Valley, a large share of the website fields on Facebook About tabs point at something that does not work: an expired domain, a mistyped shortener, a Google Form, a shared chat transcript that somebody pasted in by mistake. Nobody notices, because the page owner never taps their own link.
Followers are not yours. Organic reach is decided by Facebook and has been falling for a decade. If the page is restricted, or the person who set it up leaves, the enrolment channel goes with it.
With no fees and no timetable published, every single enquiry starts from zero, and a good share of those conversations end in someone deciding you are out of budget. Publishing the price does not lose you those parents; it just means you did not spend twenty minutes finding out.
A simple test. Open your own Facebook page on your phone as though you were a parent who has never heard of you. Try to answer three questions: what does it cost, when are the classes, and where exactly are you. Time yourself.
If you cannot do it in a minute, neither can they, and they will not try as hard as you did.
It is not website or nothing. A properly set up Google Business Profile puts you in the map results with your hours, your photos, your phone number and your reviews, and it is free. Most centres either never claimed theirs or filled in a third of it.
If that is your situation, that is the first thing to fix, and it is cheaper than a website by a wide margin. I charge RM600 to do it properly, and I will tell you if you do not need a site on top of it.
Keep the Facebook page. It is doing real work, especially for parents who already know you. What it cannot do is be found by someone who does not know your name yet, or answer a question at eleven at night without you.
A website is not a replacement for the page. It is the thing the page links to when somebody finally taps it.
Send me your Facebook page and I will tell you honestly whether a website would change anything for you this year. If the answer is no, that is the answer you will get.