Do I need a website for my barbershop if I am on Booksy and Instagram?

Start with what you have. Booksy runs your diary, takes the deposits and sends the reminders, so your day goes on cutting hair rather than chasing no-shows. Instagram shows your best work to the people who already follow you, and it's where you tell them what you've been doing this week. Both are doing what they're built for. Neither is built to find people who don't know you yet.

When someone in your town wants a skin fade this Saturday, they'll search Google first. What comes back are websites, addresses with a shop's name on them. Your Booksy profile lives inside booksy.com, in the same layout as every other barber nearby, with those shops a tap away on the same screen. Google can show that page, but it's showing the marketplace, not you. Inside it you're ranked against everyone else on reviews, distance and availability, which is exactly what a marketplace is supposed to do.

Why your own site finds new customers

Search and AI read the open web. Google, ChatGPT and Claude all fetch pages at addresses like yourbarbers.co.uk. A Booksy profile is mostly not something they can fetch. If the only description of your shop out on the open web is the one typed into a platform's template, that's the version anything reading about you has to work from.

When you own the site, you own the exact words people search for. Skin fade. Beard sculpting. Hot towel shave. Kids' cuts on a Saturday morning. Each of those can have a page of its own, written in the language of the person running that search, so they see themselves in it when they read it. Your Booksy profile can list services. Your site can say why someone should sit in your chair rather than the one down the road.

That's the difference between being in front of everyone on a platform and being in front of the people who are actually looking for what you do. They have decided they want a barber. Now they're deciding which one. Someone typing the name of a cut into Google on a Friday night is not the same customer as someone flicking through a feed on the bus. He's already sold on the idea of a haircut and is only working out whose chair to sit in, and the page he reads while he decides may as well be one you wrote.

How we make it simple

We build the site from your Google Business Profile. The hours, the phone number, the address and the reviews Google is already showing become the foundation of it. You don't type them twice, and they don't get out of sync with what Google is telling people today.

From that listing we make a page for each service on it, and an FAQ built from the questions your reviews keep raising: parking, walk-ins, how long a cut takes, whether the beard trim includes a hot towel. If you want a page for the nervous first-timer who doesn't know how to ask for what he wants, that's the kind of page a site of your own can carry, and it's a page you can add.

The technical work you would otherwise pay an SEO person for is part of the build. The site is written to be indexed by Google and read by ChatGPT: real pages of text, structured data describing the shop, a sitemap, and the whole thing submitted to Google and Bing the day it goes live. Google can show a page at your address, under your shop's name, working for one barbershop.

It's live minutes after you type the shop's name in, not weeks after a brief, and there's nothing to write beforehand and no design meeting to sit through. Change your hours or add a service on your Google listing and the site follows, so a new price or a bank holiday closing is one edit in a place you already keep up to date, not two.

How they work together

Booksy keeps the bookings. Generate a booking link in Booksy, put it behind the Book button on your site, and the appointment lands in your calendar exactly as it does now. Same diary, same deposits, same reminders. There's a second reason to send people that way: Booksy can charge a fee on a client's first appointment when they discover you through the marketplace, and a client who arrives through your own site and books on your link isn't a marketplace discovery.

Your Instagram bio points at your site instead of at a listing, so the followers who came for one before-and-after land somewhere you control and can read about the cut they're after. The website field on your Google Business Profile points at the same place. That's the link most people press once Google has shown them your name, and it should open a page that is only about your shop.

What you pay

£30 a month. A real multi-page site on your own .co.uk or .com, built from your Google listing, live a couple of minutes after you start it. Hosting and updates are in that figure, so nothing renews separately. It's free to look at before you pay anything, it's yours to cancel any month, and the domain stays with you either way.

Put your shop's name into our barbershop page and we'll build one from your Google listing. Have a look at it before you decide.