The question deserves a real answer, and the reflex "of course you need a website" is a bit short. Plenty of tradespeople have worked for ten years off a Facebook page, a phone and word of mouth, and it works.
So let us look at what each one does well.
What a Facebook page does better than a website
Worth saying, because it is true:
- Publishing is instant. A photo from the job, from your phone, in ten seconds, without going through anyone.
- Distribution is built in. Your followers see the post, share it, comment. A website does none of that on its own.
- Social proof is visible. Reviews, comments, people replying. That is reassuring, and it is free.
- It costs nothing to start.
If your trade lives off your neighbourhood and your existing customers, that setup is far from ridiculous.
The two things it does not do
It is barely findable by someone looking for you who does not already know you.
This is the decisive point. When someone has a burst pipe, they do not go to Facebook. They type "plumber" and their town into Google. Facebook pages rank poorly for those searches, because they are not built for it: Facebook wants to keep people inside, not send them out to you from a search engine.
The result is that your page serves the people who already know you admirably, and almost never reaches the people looking for you. Those are the ones who grow a business.
It does not belong to you.
Your page is hosted by someone else, who alone decides the rules, what gets shown, and who sees your posts. The reach of a post has quietly shrunk over the years with nobody warning you. An account can be restricted or suspended, sometimes by mistake, and there is no support line to call. The day it happens, ten years of photos and messages go with it.
A website you pay for does not shield you from everything, but nobody can decide overnight that your customers will no longer see you.
The real question is not "one or the other"
They do different jobs. The site is your address: it can be found in a search engine, it says who you are, what you do, where and at what price, and it lets people reach you. Social media is your living shop window: it shows that you are working, right now.
The arrangement that works is simple: the site is the house, social media leads to the house. You carry on posting your jobs, and the link to the site sits in the bio.
Three signs you need a site now
- The same question keeps coming up on the phone. Your hours, your area, whether you do that kind of work, whether you are insured. Each of those is a page you write once.
- You want to grow past word of mouth. Word of mouth has a ceiling, and it is geographic. Local search does not.
- You sell trust before you sell a service. Practitioners, care professions, tradespeople who work inside people's homes: there, a page with real words, real photos and a visible phone number is not a luxury.
And if you have neither
Start with the most profitable of the two, and it is neither a site nor Facebook: it is your Google business listing, the panel that appears on the right when someone searches your name, with the address, the hours and the reviews. It is free, it takes an hour to fill in, and for a local trade it often brings more calls than everything else put together. A website comes next, and the two reinforce each other.
Tell us where you stand and we will say plainly what to start with, even if the answer is "not yet". Written answer within two working days, free and with no strings.