Do you need a website if you have a Facebook page

What a Facebook page genuinely does better

• It is where your existing customers already are, and posting costs nothing.
• Reviews and recommendations from real local people carry more weight than anything you could write.
• Messenger is a faster route to a conversation than any contact form.
• Events, offers and day to day updates belong there and nowhere else.

None of that is in dispute. If the page is busy and the phone rings, it is doing its job and a website is an addition rather than a replacement.

The five things a page cannot do

Be found by someone who is not on Facebook

A large share of searches for a local trade happen on Google by people who will never log into Facebook to find you. To them you do not exist.

Rank for what you do

Facebook pages very rarely appear for "emergency plumber in [town]". Websites do, and so do Google Business Profiles. This is where the work comes from.

Carry your own address

An email signature, a van, a business card and an invoice all want yourbusiness.com, not a URL with a numeric page ID in it.

Present the information people check

Prices, a service list, a menu, your certifications, opening hours in a form that does not scroll away under three weeks of posts.

Belong to you

Pages get restricted, hacked, or lost with the personal account that administers them, and there is often no human to appeal to. It happens to somebody every week.

How to decide

If all your work comes from repeat customers and referrals, and the page is busy, you can wait. Get a Google Business Profile first: it is free, and for a local business it does more than either a page or a website on its own.

If you are trying to be found by people who do not know you yet, or you are quoting for work against companies who look more established on paper, the website is the thing that closes that gap. The right answer is almost always both, and in that order: profile, then website, with the Facebook page carrying on exactly as it is.

What a site costs if you decide it is worth it

$199 to build it, $15 a month hosted, and the address from $35 a year in your name. You see the finished thing first and pay nothing to look.

What you actually end up owning

Most ways of getting a website end with you renting one. Cancel a builder subscription and the pages stop existing; there is nothing to take with you because there was never a file. That is the trade you make for the monthly price, and plenty of people make it knowingly.

This is not that. What gets built for you is a WordPress theme: a real folder of files, with its own style.css, index.php and functions.php, that installs through Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme on any WordPress host in the world. We host it for you at $15 a month so you never have to think about it, and the web address is registered in your name, not ours.

If you ever want to leave, ask for a copy and it is yours: the theme file, the address, the content. You can hand it to any developer and they will recognise exactly what they are looking at, because it is an ordinary WordPress theme and not a proprietary export nobody else can open.