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 10 years off a Facebook page, a phone and word of mouth, and it works. Before deciding between a website or Facebook page, let us look at what each one does well.
What social media does better than a website
Worth saying, because it is true:
- Publishing is instant. A photo from the job, from your phone, in 30 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. Plenty of businesses have run on it for a decade without a single line of their own code. The problem arrives when you want to grow, or when the platform changes its mind.
The two things Facebook does not do
Being found on Google, and gaining local visibility
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: the network wants to keep people inside, not send them out to you from a search engine. Its logic and yours diverge exactly there.
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.
Belonging 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, 10 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.
Website or Facebook page: the question is badly framed
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, and that somebody answers.
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. Choosing between the two is like choosing between an address and a sign above the door, when a business needs both.
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 and never repeat again.
You want to grow past word of mouth. Word of mouth has a ceiling, and it is geographic: it stops at the people your existing customers happen to talk to. Local visibility in a search engine has no such limit. It reaches somebody moving into your street tomorrow, who has never heard your name and needs your trade this week.
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. It is what gets the phone picked up instead of the next name on the list.
If your need goes past a shop window, online booking or a customer area for instance, the question becomes one of a bespoke tool or an app. That gets decided before you start, not after.
Where to start: the Google business listing first
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 1 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: the listing gains from pointing at a real site, and the site gains the reviews from the listing.
If that is where you are, the website design and development page sets out what goes into a first site, and the article on what a website costs gives the orders of magnitude before you go asking for 3 quotes.
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.
BloomwiseKey takeaways