Is a Website Still Worth It in 2026?
Short answer: for most local businesses, yes. Longer answer: it depends on what you sell and how people find you, and the value shows up differently for a builder than it does for a barbershop.
It's also a live question in New Zealand right now. A 2025 InternetNZ survey of 750 businesses and 500 consumers found that 47% of NZ businesses operate without a website, rising to three in four among sole traders. In the same survey, almost three-quarters of consumers named a business's website as the most important tool for engaging with it, ahead of social media (InternetNZ, reported by eCommerceNews). InternetNZ's research director Tim Johnson pointed to a second trend behind that gap: people are using social media less, not more, which matters if a business is relying on a Facebook page to do a website's job.
Service businesses: the website is your portfolio
If you're a builder, electrician, designer, or consultant, your best sales tool is proof that you've done good work before. A website is where that proof lives. Photos of finished jobs, a list of who you've worked with, a couple of real quotes from past clients: none of that fits neatly into a Facebook page, and none of it shows up when someone searches your business name on Google if it isn't there.
This is the group with the clearest case. Someone comparing three tradespeople for a quote will look at all three websites in the same sitting. Whoever looks most credible in that five-minute window gets the call back.
Restaurants: the booking button is doing real work
Toast, the restaurant point-of-sale company, surveyed diners across its platform in 2025 and found that 65% go directly to a restaurant's website to make a reservation, and 55% turn to Google first to find where to book (Toast, 2025). If a restaurant's site doesn't have a booking link, or the site doesn't exist, a chunk of that traffic leaves and tries somewhere else.
This matters even more once a restaurant catches a wave online. Influencer and creator-driven food content is where a lot of restaurant discovery happens now, especially with younger diners, and TikTok has turned more than a few unknown spots into queues out the door. A croissant at a New York bakery, a taco stand in Michigan run by a 19-year-old, an ice cream shop's hot chocolate: all of it went from local secret to booked out after one video took off (CNN, ABC12).
Auckland has its own version. Kusina Bakehouse, a home-based Filipino bakery, went viral for its Ilocos empanadas, and people still talk about it months later. Orders run through Facebook Messenger, with pickup on set days. That works for a home operation with a founder who can manage the DMs personally. A restaurant with a dining room and staff to pay doesn't have that luxury: when the video hits and hundreds of people search your name in the same hour, you need somewhere that takes the booking without a person on the other end typing back.
Hair, beauty, and barbers: the visuals plus the booking flow
Before-and-after photos are the highest-converting content a salon or barber can post. A strong cut or colour result sells itself the moment someone sees it, and a home page built around real client transformations does more convincing than any paragraph of copy.
Pair that with the booking step and the picture gets clearer. Booking software company Boulevard analysed more than 11 million appointments across 30,000+ salon businesses and found that clients who book their first appointment online are twice as likely to return for a second visit than clients who don't. The gap compounds from there: top-performing salons convert 70% of first-time visits into a second appointment, against 45% for salons with average retention (Boulevard, via Salon Today). The photo gets attention. The booking button is what turns that attention into a client who comes back.
The Google Business Profile isn't enough on its own
Someone finds you through a TikTok video, a friend's recommendation, or a plain Google search, and the next thing they do is check you out. They'll see your Google Business Profile with your reviews and photos. A real website sitting next to it, linked and consistent with what they saw, makes you look like an established business worth trusting with their money. No website, or a profile that links to a dead page, and that moment of interest has nowhere to land.
That lines up with what InternetNZ found: consumers rank a website above social media as the most trusted way to engage with a business. A Google Business Profile gets someone in the door of your online presence. The website is what convinces them to stay. We've broken down exactly what a Google Business Profile does and doesn't do compared to a website if you're weighing whether the free profile alone is enough.
Where it matters less
Not every business needs one. A tradesperson who works entirely off referrals and repeat clients, or a business that sells exclusively through a marketplace like Uber Eats or a big platform, can sometimes get by on a Google Business Profile and social presence alone. Even then, growth usually stalls at some point without a place to send new leads that isn't rented from someone else's algorithm.
If you're weighing it for your own business, ask whether people who discover you today have somewhere to go once they're interested. For most service businesses, restaurants, and salons, right now, they don't. That's the gap a website closes. And if the answer is yes, the next question is usually budget — our breakdown of what a website actually costs in New Zealand covers the realistic ranges.