Do I need a website for my small business in NZ? What the research says

The short answer: if you want new customers to find you and trust you, yes. In InternetNZ’s 2025 research, 74% of NZ consumers called a business’s website the most important way to engage with it — yet 47% of NZ businesses still don’t have one, and only one in four sole traders do. That gap is your opportunity or your risk, depending on which side you’re on.

What the 2025 numbers actually say

InternetNZ’s research — 750 NZ businesses and 500 consumers, surveyed by Yabble and published in December 2025 — is the clearest picture we have of the local gap:

47% of NZ businesses have no website.
Only about 25% of sole traders have one.
74% of consumers say a business’s website is the most important tool for engaging with it.
61% of businesses agree a website is their most important digital tool — but only 53% actually have one.
More than half of consumers want to buy online; only a third of businesses think that matters.

Read those together and the story is plain: customers have moved further online than the businesses they’re trying to find. That mismatch doesn’t show up as complaints. It shows up as people quietly choosing whoever they could find.

”But I’ve got a Facebook page”

So do most businesses without websites — and it made sense for years: free, easy, and everyone was on it.

Three problems have grown since:

Reach is rented. A feed algorithm decides who sees your posts, and it changes without asking you. InternetNZ’s own commentary on the 2025 research was blunt: people are using social media less, while businesses still lean on it heavily.
Trust sits with owned presence. In the same research, 74% of businesses and 62% of consumers said they find a .nz web address more trustworthy. A real domain signals a real business in a way a profile page can’t.
Search and AI can’t read a feed well. Your Facebook page is thin, inconsistent material for Google and AI assistants. A page you own, stating what you do and where you work in plain text, is exactly what they quote.

Keep the Facebook page. Just stop making it the whole strategy — it’s the flyer, not the shopfront.

The new reason: people now ask AI

The freshest shift is the strongest argument. In BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey, 45% of consumers had used AI tools to find or choose local businesses — up from 6% a year earlier. ChatGPT alone was used for recommendations by 31% of consumers.

AI assistants recommend businesses based on what they can read: websites, reviews, directories. No website means there’s almost nothing in your own words for them to draw on. We’ve written a full guide on how to get found on ChatGPT and AI search, but step one is always the same: have a home page that states the facts.

The honest exceptions

A website isn’t a moral obligation. You probably don’t need one if:

Your books are genuinely full and you’d turn away new work anyway — some great tradies live here for years.
You’re winding down toward retirement or sale-by-relationships.
All your work comes from one or two contracts and end customers never choose you.

If that’s you, save your money. The rest of us are competing for customers who check before they call.

What fixing it costs

Less than most owners think — MBIE’s digital-capability research found cost is the barrier holding nearly half of NZ businesses back, but the market has moved. The full price landscape is in our NZ website cost guide; the short version is that DIY starts around $25 a month plus your evenings, pay-monthly services run $95–$299 a month, and our own LaunchPad plan is $1 a day — $365 + GST a year ($419.75 incl. GST) — with the build free during launch, domain, hosting and updates included. You can see what your site would look like, free, before paying anything.

Common questions

Is a Facebook page enough for a small business in NZ?

Usually not any more. InternetNZ's 2025 research found 74% of NZ consumers rate a business's website as the most important way to engage with it, and reported people are using social media less. A Facebook page is rented space run by someone else's algorithm; a website is the home you own.

Is a free Google Business Profile enough without a website?

It helps a lot for maps and local search, and every business should have one. But it's a listing, not a home: you can't lay out your services, story, photos and proof the way a page you own can, and AI tools have far less to read and quote. Profile plus website is the combination that works.

I get all my work by word of mouth. Do I still need a website?

Referred customers still check you out before they call — and a referral with nowhere to land goes cold quietly. If your books are genuinely full for the next year and you want no more work, you can skip it. Otherwise a simple one-page site turns recommendations into contact.

What should a small business website include?

Plain-English answers to what a customer asks: what you do, where you work, what it roughly costs or how quoting works, proof like reviews and photos of real jobs, and an obvious way to contact you. One well-organised page covers all of that for most local businesses.

How quickly will a website bring in customers?

Honestly: it varies, and anyone giving you a fixed timeline is guessing. Being findable and looking credible removes a reason to pick a competitor from day one, while search visibility builds over months. Treat it like insurance plus compounding, not a tap.

Is it too late to get online if my competitors already have websites?

No. In InternetNZ's 2025 research, 47% of NZ businesses still had no website, so plenty of your local market is still invisible. Late is a much smaller problem than absent — especially now that AI tools recommend businesses based on what they can read.