Because the Facebook page is not yours. It is a storefront you rent inside somebody else’s building, and the landlord decides who gets to walk in the door. The specific thing that hurts you is the login wall. When somebody passing through town searches on their phone and taps your Facebook link, there is a good chance they get a prompt demanding they log in before they can see your hours or your products and services. That person is looking for something from their phone. They are not going to recover a forgotten password on two bars of signal, and they will be at a competitor down the road inside of ninety seconds.

The part that makes this so frustrating is that you will never know it happened. Facebook’s page insights do not show you the people who bounced off a login prompt without authenticating, so your dashboard looks fine while you quietly lose customers every week. A website you own has no gate on it. Anybody can see your hours, your products and services, and your phone number without an account, without an app, and without permission from a company that does not care whether you stay in business.

Eventually, yes, but not on day one. That page is not an asset, it is a trap and a jail for your content, and it is another flavor of the same vendor lock in that got you here. But it is also a megaphone you already paid for in followers, so use it on the way out the door.

Here is how I would sequence it. Once the new site is live, put your customers on blast. Post the link every single day for a while if that is what it takes, put it in your bio, put it on your receipts, put it on the door. Let the page and the site run side by side for a transition window so nobody gets stranded. Then kill the page. Once you have a site you own, you can also claim your Google Business Profile for free, which gives you your phone number, address, hours, and a link pointing at property that belongs to you one hundred percent.

I can, as a separate optimization service. Claiming and running the profile yourself is free and I would never tell you otherwise, so if you have the time and the patience, do it. Where I usually get pulled in is when a profile has wrong information, duplicate listings, bad categories, or it is pointing at a site that no longer exists.

One thing to know up front, because owners are rightly protective of this. To work on your profile, I need to be added as an admin. That is temporary and it ends when the work is done, and the profile always belongs to you. I am not going to hold your Google listing hostage, and anybody who would is not somebody you should hire.

BWD Launch includes basic on page optimization using the free local features of Rank Math, which is the SEO plugin I build on. That covers the fundamentals: your pages are structured properly, your business information is marked up so search engines can read it, and your site is not fighting itself. For a lot of small businesses, that is a meaningful improvement over what they had.

Deeper local optimization is a separate service. It requires the paid version of the plugin and, more importantly, it requires my time to do the work properly. It is worth understanding that local search and your Google Business Profile feed each other, because the structured data on your website is part of what Google pulls when it decides who ranks for a local query. Getting one right and ignoring the other leaves results on the table.

BWD Launch is a five page WordPress website built on a custom lightweight template I maintain myself. Five pages covers what most small businesses actually need, which is generally a home page, legal pages (privacy policy), an about page, a contact page with your hours and directions, and one more for whatever matters most to you. It is a one time build at a fixed price of six hundred dollars, and when it is finished it is yours.

Everything past that five page foundation is either an integration or an optimization, and both are quoted separately. E-commerce is an integration. Custom functionality plugins are an integration. Deep local search work is an optimization. Google Business Profile work is an optimization. I break it out this way so you can see exactly what you are paying for and decide what you actually need, instead of buying a bundle where half of it is dead weight.

Because when you build on a proprietary platform you are renting again, and we already went through why that is a bad idea. Those builders are convenient right up until you want to do something they did not plan for, or until they raise their price, or until they decide the feature you depend on is going away. Your site lives inside their walls and leaving means starting over.

WordPress is not perfect and it can absolutely be slow when it is stuffed full of plugins, which is why I keep the build lean and write custom code where an off the shelf plugin would drag you down. But it is yours, it runs on any decent host, and any competent developer on the planet can pick it up if I get hit by a bus. That matters more than people realize when they are choosing a platform.

No, and I think that is the right answer for you. I have one host I recommend after twenty plus years of doing this, which is KnownHost. I am not an affiliate and I do not take a commission for saying that, which is exactly why I am comfortable saying it as strongly as I do. I moved a site off GoDaddy to them and the migration was perfect.

The way it works is that we talk about what your site actually needs, then I send you a link for the plan I think fits without overpaying for performance you will never use. You sign up, the account is in your name, and the bill is in your name. You give me the login details for the build, and I discard them when the work is finished unless you are keeping me on retainer. Keeping hosting in your name means you are never locked to me. If you decide you would rather work with somebody else next year, you just do it.

Usually yes, and usually for free. KnownHost includes migration on their managed plans when it is a standard transfer between supported control panels, which covers cPanel to cPanel, Plesk to cPanel, DirectAdmin to cPanel, and DirectAdmin to DirectAdmin. Most small business sites sitting on a mainstream host are running cPanel, so most of you land in the free lane. They handle the files, the databases, and the email, and most WordPress migrations are finished in under an hour. You can read their terms on what is covered directly rather than taking my word for it.

It becomes a paid job when the work goes past a straightforward panel to panel move, which means things like merging several sites into one environment, sources with no control panel access, or a complicated multisite setup. In those cases they scope it and quote it before anybody starts, so there are no surprises. Either way, note that a migration is not a BWD Launch build. If all you want is to get off a bad host and keep your existing site as is, that is a separate service.

I ask for a two week window. It often does not take the full two weeks, but I would rather ask for room and deliver early than promise you four days and then have life happen.

The honest reason for the window is that I still have a day job on a manufacturing floor. I am working toward doing this full time, and the way I get there is by doing work good enough that people send me their neighbors. What I will not do is overcommit on a timeline to win a job and then leave you refreshing an unfinished site. If something is going to slip, you will hear it from me before you have to ask.

You are the best qualified person to write about your own products, and that is not me dodging the work. Nobody knows your business the way you do. That said, waiting on a busy owner to write copy is the number one reason small business websites sit unfinished for six months, so I do not make you start from a blank page.

My process is a discovery conversation, where I get the information out of your head and into my notes. I take that and write boilerplate copy for the build, then you review it and sign off before anything goes live. Nothing publishes that you have not approved. Once the site is up, you are free to rewrite any of it whenever you want, because you have the keys. To be clear about where that ends, the copy I write covers the pages in your build, not the contents of your product listings, which is a separate thing which requires a retainer fee and hourly fee (labor outside the initial build).

Yes. I build it, then I drop the keys, and the keys are yours. You own the domain, the hosting account, the content, and the site itself. There is nothing in my build that I can reach back and switch off, and I would not want that kind of leverage over a client anyway.

Custom plugins created by BWD are included with your build and I do not charge a separate license for them. The only limit is the obvious one, which is that you cannot turn around and sell it (my plugin) or resell installations of it to other businesses. Use it on your site as much as you like, forever. You can sell the website as a whole work though, plugin included if you should happen to sell the business. Totally up to you.

Nothing dramatic. Your hosting is in your name, your domain is in your name, and the site is standard WordPress. Any competent developer can open it up and get to work without calling me for permission or a password. That is not an accident, it is the whole reason I build this way.

I would rather keep clients because the work is good than because leaving is painful. If you outgrow me or you find somebody you like better, you should be able to go without paying a ransom.

Ongoing work runs on a one hundred twenty five dollar monthly retainer plus twenty five dollars an hour with a one hour minimum. That covers changes, additions, troubleshooting, and anything else that comes up after launch.

You are not required to have it. Plenty of owners take the keys, handle their own updates, and never need me again, and that is a completely legitimate outcome. Keep me on if you would rather not touch it, or if you know you are going to want changes regularly. Otherwise, call me when something comes up.