Website or just a Facebook and Instagram page?

Let us start with the part that earns us — a company that builds websites — no money at all: there are real situations where you do not need a website. Facebook ads can reach about 1.5 million people in Moldova, Instagram ads about 1.2 million (ad-audience estimates, DataReportal, 2026). If your clients are there and message you directly, the page is doing its job.

• —You are testing a business idea — the page is free and you can start it today. There is no point paying for a website before you know the product sells.
• —You sell visual products at low volume, through messages — custom cakes, handmade goods, bouquets, manicure. The photo sells, the order closes in Instagram Direct, and that works.
• —You are fully booked through referrals — if you have as many clients as you can handle and do not want to grow right now, a website solves no urgent problem.
• —You are the brand — people follow you personally (trainers, photographers, artists); they do not google "service + city".

A free in-between step we recommend either way: a Google Business profile. It puts your company on the map, with hours, phone number and reviews — and it is often all a café or a small repair shop needs to be found locally. Nobody sells it to you, because it is free.

The difference between social media and a website is not technical — it is behavioural. On Facebook and Instagram people discover: they scroll, see a photo, remember you. On Google people search: they need something now and type "fridge repair Chișinău" or "accountant Bălți". Almost 9 out of 10 searches in Moldova go through Google (StatCounter, July 2026).

The test: google your service plus your city, exactly as a client would type it. If your competitors show up in the results and you do not, those orders go to them, not to you. Facebook pages rarely appear in such searches: a page is usually found by the company name, not by the service you sell. Since July 2025 Google can also show public Instagram business accounts in its results, but a stream of posts still does not answer the questions a searcher arrives with: what you do, what it costs, where you are, how to contact you.

To say it plainly: a website does not guarantee you first place on Google — nobody can guarantee that, and you should run from anyone who promises it. The difference is elsewhere: a website has a real chance to appear when someone searches for your service; a social media page — almost none.

We are not selling fear: the chance of losing your account tomorrow is small. But the risk is real and documented, and the difference from a website comes down to one thing: the account is not yours. The terms of Meta — the company that owns Facebook and Instagram — allow it to suspend or terminate the account, and for a regular business account there is no phone number to call.

• —Hacked or locked accounts — it happened so often that in March 2024 the attorneys general of 41 US states formally demanded that Meta fix the problem. In New York State alone, complaints had grown more than tenfold in four years. ABC7 Chicago and NPR documented small businesses locked out of their pages for months.
• —Global outages — on 4 October 2021 Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for about 6 hours; on 5 March 2024 there was another outage of about two hours. CNBC wrote about shops that sold only through social media and sold nothing on the day of the 2021 outage.
• —The algorithm decides who sees you — Facebook officially admitted back in 2014 that page posts reach fewer and fewer followers without paid ads; recent independent measurements (Socialinsider, 2024–2025) put it at a few percent. Your follower base effectively lives as a tenant of an algorithm.

The documented cases are from the US — that is where they were reported. But the platform terms and the automated recovery process are exactly the same for an account in Chișinău.

Staying social-only for now? Fine — then at least protect yourself for free: add a second admin, turn on two-factor authentication (the code that arrives on your phone at login) and keep your clients’ contacts outside the platform too. A website solves this differently: the domain is registered to your company, you can move it to another provider at any time, and it does not depend on any platform’s rules or algorithm.

The right moment for a website does not come from an article — it comes from your business. The signs that show up most often:

• —You answer the same questions in messages every day — price, hours, address, "do you still have it?". A website answers once, for everyone.
• —You cannot keep up with Direct — a lost message is a lost order. The classic sign the page has been outgrown.
• —Competitors show up on Google for your service, and you do not.
• —You have clients in both Romanian and Russian — you can write every post in two languages, but that does not help in search. A website has separate Romanian and Russian versions, each findable in its own language.
• —You pay for ads, but the only places you can send people are your profile or your inbox — not a page with prices, hours and a clear order button.
• —You want bigger contracts — serious companies check you out before signing, and "just a Facebook page" raises questions.

The question in the title is, honestly, the wrong question — and we phrased it that way because that is how everyone searches for it. The page and the website do different jobs and help each other: the page works on the people who already know you, the website on the people who are still searching for you.

The healthy path, in order: a well-kept social page → a free Google Business profile → a one-page website (from around €350, indicative) → a business website with a page per service, built to show up on Google for searches in your area (from around €700, indicative) — when the numbers call for it. Do not skip stages and do not pay for what you do not need yet.

On top of these amounts come small but real yearly costs — the domain and the hosting. We break them down, along with everything else that moves the price, in our pricing guide: