Facebook page or website for a pizzeria?
A Facebook page is a good place to talk to people who already follow you and a bad place to be found by people who do not. It cannot reliably tell a search engine your prices, your hours or your address, it buries the menu under whatever you posted last, and you do not own it. Most pizzerias should have both — but the page should point at the site, not replace it.
The two jobs, and which does which
| Facebook page | Your own site | |
|---|---|---|
| Reaching existing followers | Good | Weak |
| Being found by a stranger nearby | Weak | Good |
| Menu with current prices | Buried in the feed | The main page |
| Opening hours a search engine can read | Unreliable | Structured data |
| Allergens in writing before ordering | Not really | Per dish |
| Who owns it | Meta | You |
| Cost | £0 | £0 – 400 a year |
The specific failure is search
When somebody two streets away searches for pizza, the search engine is trying to answer three questions: are they open, what do they charge, and where are they. A page whose menu is a photo posted in March, whose hours live in a sidebar that is often wrong, and whose latest post is about a bank holiday, does not answer any of them in a form a machine can use.
A web page can say all three explicitly, in markup, and get shown for it. That is essentially the whole argument.
When the Facebook page is doing the better job
- Your customers genuinely live there. In some towns the local community group is where everything happens, and a post reaches more people in an hour than your site will in a month.
- Tonight's specials and last-minute changes. A feed is the right shape for "closing early, boiler's gone". A website is not.
- Photos and personality. The oven, the team, the queue on a Friday. This is what social is for and it does sell pizza.
- Paid local reach. Cheap, precise and immediate in a way organic search is not, especially for a new opening.
None of that requires 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 like you.
- Put the website link in the page's button and in the About section.
- Keep the menu and the hours on the site, and let the page link to them.
- When a price changes, change it once, on the site.
The page becomes what it is good at — a conversation with regulars — and stops pretending to be an address.
The ownership point, briefly
Accounts get restricted, pages get hacked, reach algorithms change, and none of those are things you can appeal to a person about. It is not a reason to avoid Facebook. It is a reason not to let it be the only place your prices exist.