Facebook page or website for a pizzeria?
A Facebook page is a good way to talk to people who already follow your pizzeria and a poor way to be found by people who don’t. It can’t reliably tell a search engine your prices, hours or address, it buries the menu under your latest post, and Meta owns it, not you. Most pizzerias should have both, but the page should point to the site, not replace it.
Two jobs, and which does which
| Facebook page | Your own site | |
|---|---|---|
| Reaching people who already follow you | Good | Weak |
| Being found by a stranger nearby | Weak | Good |
| Menu with current prices and sizes | Buried in the feed | The main page |
| Hours a search engine can read | Unreliable | Structured data |
| Allergen notes per dish before ordering | Not really | Yes |
| Taking an order without a commission | No | Yes |
| Who owns it | Meta | You |
| Cost | $0 | $0 to $19 a month + sales tax |
The real failure is search
When someone a mile away types “pizza near me,” the search engine is trying to answer three questions: are you open, what do you charge, and where are you. A page whose menu is a photo from last spring, whose hours sit in a sidebar nobody updated after the holidays, and whose newest post is about the Super Bowl special, answers none of them in a form a machine can read.
A web page can state all three plainly, in markup that Google reads, and get shown for it. That is most of the argument.
When the Facebook page does the better job
- Your customers live there. In many towns the local Facebook group is where everything happens, and one post can reach more neighbors in an hour than your site does in a month.
- Tonight’s specials and last-minute changes. A feed is the right shape for “closing early, the oven’s down.”
- Photos and personality. The oven, the crew, the line out the door on a Friday. That sells pizza.
- Paid local reach. Cheap, precise and fast, especially for a new opening.
None of that needs the page to be your menu, your hours or your only address on the internet.
The arrangement that works
- Keep posting on Facebook. It is free reach to people who already like you.
- Put your website in the page’s action button and About section.
- Keep the menu, prices and hours on the site, and link to them from posts.
- When a price changes, change it once, on the site.
- Let customers order from the site, so a post can end with “order here” and no app takes a cut.
The ownership point, briefly
Accounts get restricted, pages get hacked, reach changes overnight, and there is rarely a person to appeal to. None of that is a reason to avoid Facebook. It is a reason not to let it be the only place your prices exist.