Is a Facebook page enough, or do I need a website?

If you’re booked out by word of mouth, you’re not trying to grow, and you’re happy for Facebook to control your reach — a page is genuinely enough. If you want people who’ve never heard of you to find you and get in touch, it isn’t. Facebook pages barely appear in Google, can’t answer the questions that win a job, and aren’t actually yours.

The honest case first, because it’s a real one.

When a Facebook page really is enough

Plenty of local businesses run fine on one, and anyone saying otherwise is selling something.

It’s free, it takes an afternoon, and your customers are already there. For visual, repeat-custom trades — cafés, salons, dog groomers — the feed does real work. Photos of today’s job, a note that you’re shut Monday, a bit of back-and-forth in the comments. That’s genuine marketing at no cost.

If your work comes from a village that knows you and you’ve got as much as you can handle, you don’t need us or anyone like us. Read on anyway, so you know what you’re choosing.

The five things it can’t do

1. Turn up when someone searches for the job. Nobody opens Facebook and searches “plumber”. They open Google, and the blue links go to websites. A page on someone else’s platform isn’t competing for “emergency plumber leicester”. Every search where the customer doesn’t already know your name happens somewhere your Facebook page isn’t.

2. Back up your Google Business Profile. This is the one that actually costs money, and it’s invisible. You fix the profile, you start showing in the map pack, someone taps your website link — and lands on Facebook. Some hit a login prompt. Some see three posts from last spring and quietly assume you’ve packed it in. Some are on a work phone with Facebook blocked. The profile did its job; the destination didn’t.

3. Take an enquiry properly at eleven at night. A Facebook message sits in an app you might not check until Thursday, in an inbox that also has your cousin’s holiday photos. A website form emails you, timestamps itself, and captures a number, a postcode and a description of the job. When a boiler goes at eleven at night, the business that wins is the one that made it possible to leave the details.

4. Answer the questions that win the job. Before ringing a stranger who’s coming to their house, people want to know roughly what you charge, whether you cover their village, whether you’re actually registered, and what happens if it goes wrong. A website answers that at two in the morning without you doing anything. A Facebook page makes them ask — and most won’t. They’ll ring the next one who’d already told them.

5. Be yours. Reach changes without warning. Accounts get hacked, and getting a business page back is famously miserable. Pages get disabled by automated systems with an appeal process that goes nowhere.

And it isn’t just Facebook. Google itself used to give businesses a free basic website through Google Business Profile — and switched them off in 2024. Thousands of small businesses lost their web presence overnight, and anyone who’d printed that address on a van was suddenly pointing customers at a dead link. That’s the risk with building on someone else’s land: it’s fine right up until it isn’t, and you get no vote.

You need less than you think

Here’s where people get stuck — they assume “website” means a big expensive project, so they put it off another year.

For most local businesses the useful version is small:

• A home page saying what you do and where, phone number visible without scrolling
• One page for each main service — the actual jobs people search for, one page each
• An about page with real photos of real people, and your certifications
• A contact page with a form, a number, and the areas you cover

Five pages. That’s a functioning, findable website for a local trade, and everything past it is refinement.

The part people underestimate isn’t the design — it’s the one-page-per-service bit. It’s the difference between a site that exists and a site that gets found.

What to do this week

1. Open your Google Business Profile and look at the website link. Where does it actually go?
2. Buy your domain if you haven’t — your own name, before someone else has it. About a tenner.
3. Write down the four or five jobs you want more of. That list is your website’s structure, whoever ends up building it.

So what does one actually cost?

That’s where everybody arrives, and nobody gives a straight answer — because “it depends” is a very convenient thing for a web designer to say.

Next time, the actual numbers: what you get for nothing, what changes at £650, at £1,000, at £1,750, and where the money genuinely goes.

Our own prices are on the pricing page, publicly, for the same reason.