Is a Facebook page as good as a website?

No — a Facebook page and a website do different jobs. Facebook is good for engaging existing followers, but it limits your reach, controls what people see, and can’t rank in Google searches the way a website does. You don’t own your Facebook page; Facebook does, and it can change rules or restrict your account anytime. A website is property you control, findable by everyone, and built to convert visitors. Most businesses benefit from both, but one can’t replace the other.

What each one is built for

Facebook is built to keep people scrolling. Everything about it — the feed, the notifications, the ordering of posts — exists to hold attention that is already there.

A website is built for the opposite moment: someone who already wants what you sell, going looking for it. It doesn’t need to interrupt anybody. It needs to be there when it’s searched for, and to make the next step obvious.

Neither is the better tool. They’re pointed at different parts of the same customer.

Where a Facebook page genuinely wins

It’s worth being fair about this, because the answer isn’t that a page is useless.

A page is quick and free to set up. It’s very good at talking to people who already follow you — a closure because of the weather, a job you finished last week, a change to your hours over a bank holiday. Followers can message you in a way that feels like no effort at all. And a good post occasionally gets shared into someone’s local group, which is word of mouth working at speed.

If you already run a page well, keep running it. The question is only what it can’t reach.

The four places it falls short

• Strangers can’t find you through it. Someone typing “emergency plumber” and their town into Google is shown local results and websites, not Facebook pages. The people most ready to buy are the people your page is least able to reach.
• The reach isn’t yours. A post reaches a fraction of the followers you worked to gather, and the platform decides which fraction. An audience you can’t reliably contact is a strange sort of asset.
• You don’t own it. The page exists under someone else’s terms and can be restricted or suspended without warning, and often without much recourse.
• It scatters your information. Hours, prices, areas covered and services end up spread across months of posts. A customer with a question has to scroll to find the answer, and most won’t.

A test that settles it

Pick up your phone and search for what you do plus your town, the way a customer would. Look at what comes back, and where your page sits in it.

Then try to answer three questions using nothing but your Facebook page: what do they charge, do they cover my village, and are they open on Saturday. Time how long it takes you — someone who has never heard of you will give it far less patience than that.

So do you need both?

Most local businesses end up with both, and use the website as the anchor. The page is the shopfront window: noticed in passing, changed often, good at reminding people you exist. The website is the shop itself, where somebody who has decided to come in finds what they need and gets served.

If you’d rather not build and maintain that second half yourself, we do the whole thing — written, built, hosted and kept current for one flat monthly fee.