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

A Facebook page helps, but it isn’t a substitute for a website. You don’t control Facebook — it owns your page, sets the rules, and shows your posts to only a fraction of followers. A website is property you own outright, ranks in Google searches Facebook can’t, loads for people who don’t use social media, and works as the trusted home base customers expect. Most successful local businesses use both: Facebook to engage, a website to convert and to be found.

Some businesses genuinely can wait

It’s worth saying plainly, because most advice on this pretends otherwise.

If you’re a one-person trade with a waiting list, all your work arrives through people who already know you, and you’ve no interest in taking on more, then a well-kept page and a claimed Google Business Profile will hold you for a good while. Nobody needs a website as a matter of principle.

The real question isn’t whether you’re allowed to manage without one. It’s whether you’ve quietly passed the point where it’s costing you.

Five signs you’ve passed that point

• You’re paying to be seen. Any spend on advertising, van livery, leaflets or sponsorship sends people off to search for you. If what they find is thin, you’ve paid for the interest and then given it away.
• Someone has told you they couldn’t find you. For every person who mentions it, assume several who didn’t bother.
• You want work you aren’t currently getting. Bigger jobs, a new service, a wider area — none of that arrives through people who already know your name.
• Competitors appear in search and you don’t. Being invisible only costs you when somebody else is visible in the same moment.
• Every enquiry comes from someone who knew you already. That means you’re harvesting reputation rather than reaching anyone new. It works, right up until it plateaus.

What a page can’t do, however well you run it

None of the gaps are about effort. You can post daily, reply within minutes, keep the photographs current — and still not be findable by someone searching for your service, because a page isn’t built to answer a search.

That, plus the fact that you don’t actually own the page, is the whole of the case. It’s set out properly in is a Facebook page as good as a website.

The cost you never see

This is the part owners underestimate, because the loss is invisible.

You meet every customer who found you. You never meet the one who searched at nine on a Sunday evening, found nothing solid, and rang the business listed below you instead. There’s no missed call, no email, no gap in the diary to point at — just a slightly smaller business than you’d otherwise have had.

Word of mouth is real and valuable, but it’s capped by the number of mouths. A website is what lets somebody recommend you to a stranger without being in the room.

What “a website” actually has to be

Not elaborate. What you do, where you work, roughly what it costs, some real photographs of your own jobs, and an obvious way to get hold of you.

It does have to be kept true, though. A neglected site still showing last year’s hours can do more harm than no site at all, so build something you’ll actually maintain — or hand the maintaining to someone else.

That second option is what we do: built, written and looked after for one flat monthly fee, so it stays true without you having to think about it.