Do I need a website if I have a Facebook page?

What a Facebook page is genuinely good at

It is free, it takes ten minutes, and people already there will see your posts without going looking. For showing that you exist, that you turned up, and that the job went well, it is hard to beat. If you post a photo of a finished bathroom and three people comment, that is real marketing and it cost nothing.

None of what follows is an argument for deleting it.

1. You do not own it

The page sits in somebody else’s account, under rules they write and change. Pages get restricted or disabled by automated systems, sometimes wrongly, and the appeal process is a form and a wait. If it goes, it takes your photos, your reviews and every customer message with it, and there is nobody to ring. A website you own cannot be switched off by anyone but you.

2. It does not answer the search people actually make

When someone needs a plumber at eight in the morning, they open Google and type “plumber Carmarthen”. They do not open Facebook and browse. Facebook pages do turn up in Google sometimes, but you are handing the search engine a page built for something else and hoping. A site with a page for each thing you do, naming the places you cover, is answering the question directly. That is most of what local SEO is.

3. It has no memory

A feed is designed to move on. Your prices, your opening hours over Christmas, the fact you now do air source heat pumps: all of it is in a post from March that nobody will ever scroll back to. Customers end up messaging to ask things you have already answered four times, which is a tax on your evenings.

4. Not everyone can see it

A good number of people are not on Facebook, and those who are not often hit a login prompt when they follow a link to a page. For a business whose customers skew older or who are simply passing through, that is a closed door with your name on it.

5. Enquiries arrive in the same place as everything else

A job enquiry lands in Messenger between a family group chat and a marketplace haggle. There is no record, no way to search it six months later when there is a dispute about what was agreed, and no way for anyone else to pick it up if you are up a ladder. A form on your own site puts the same enquiry somewhere you can find it again.

When the page really is enough

If you are booked out for the next six months on word of mouth, do not want to grow, and everyone who needs you already has your number, then a Facebook page is a perfectly rational choice and you should keep your money. The same goes if the business is genuinely a sideline. Anyone who tells you every business needs a website is selling websites.

The moment it stops being enough is usually one of three: you want work from people who have never heard of you, you are losing evenings to the same repeated questions, or you want to take a booking or an order without a conversation.

The answer is nearly always both

This was never a choice between the two. The page is where you are chatty and show the work as it happens. The site is where you are findable, where the details stay put, and where an enquiry lands somewhere sensible. They do different jobs, and the page works better when there is somewhere for it to point.