You don't need a website. You need four QR codes.

Somebody has told you that you need a website. They have probably told you several times, and quoted you for one.

For a lot of businesses — a barber, a plumber, a stall, a takeaway, a cleaner, a driving instructor — that advice is at least ten years out of date. Not because websites stopped working, but because the things a small local business needed one for have all moved somewhere else, and that somewhere else is free.

Here is the honest version of what you actually need, and the four codes that connect the printed world to it.

What people are really looking for

Almost nobody searching for a local business wants to read a website. They want four facts, in this order:

• Are you open, and where exactly are you

• Are you any good

• How do I get hold of you

• What does it cost, roughly

A Google Business Profile answers three of those, appears above the websites in search results, and costs nothing. That listing is your website now. It has your hours, your photos, your phone number, your reviews and a map, and it is the thing people actually look at.

If you do one piece of admin this month, claim and fill in that listing. Everything below assumes you have.

1. A location code, for the door nobody can find

A location code opens your exact spot in whatever map app the person already uses.

This is worth far more than a printed address if you are round the back, on an industrial estate, above a shop, or anywhere a postcode covers forty units. Coordinates do not care what the sign says or whether the satnav gives up at the gate.

On a flyer, a van, a business card, or the bottom of a printed price list.

2. A WhatsApp code, because that is where enquiries live

A WhatsApp code opens a chat with you, with the first message already typed if you want one.

For a business with no website this is the single most useful code on the list. It is a contact form, an enquiry inbox and a quote conversation, on a thing you already have in your pocket, with no hosting and nothing to build. People send photos, you answer between jobs, and nobody has to be free at the same time.

Put a different first message on each place you print it — “I saw the window”, “I saw the flyer” — and you also learn which print was worth paying for, without any analytics at all.

3. A review code, because that is your reputation

Reviews are what a stranger reads instead of your website. A Google review code opens the review box directly rather than your listing, which removes the searching and scrolling that stops most people finishing.

Ask everybody, every time, at the moment the job is done or the coffee is good. Not just the ones you expect to be kind — that breaks Google's rules and the penalty lands on the listing you are trying to build.

Twenty honest reviews will do more for a local business than any website ever quoted for.

4. A phone code, for the people who just want to ring

Not everybody wants to type. A phone code opens the dialler with your number in it, and unlike the other three it is worth printing the number beside the code, because a phone number is short enough to do both.

Older customers in particular will ring. That is not a demographic to design around, it is a demographic to serve.

When you do need a website

Being straight, because this is not an argument that websites are pointless.

You need one if you sell online, take bookings that need a calendar, have a catalogue too big to photograph, or compete on search terms that are not your own name and town. If people find you by typing what you sell rather than who you are, a listing will not carry you.

What you do not need is a five page brochure site that repeats your Google listing more slowly, costs a few hundred a year, and goes out of date the first time you change your hours.

The whole setup, in an afternoon

Claim the Google listing. Make four codes. Put them on the things you already print — the van, the door, the flyer, the receipt, the card.

None of it has a monthly fee, an account, or an expiry date. The codes are static, which means the information lives inside the code rather than on a page somebody keeps running for you, so nothing here can be switched off by a supplier going quiet.