This one comes up a lot, usually somewhere between the second and third cup of tea: "I've got a Facebook page and I get plenty of work off it - do I actually need a website?"
It's a fair question, and it deserves a better answer than "yes, obviously" from someone who happens to sell websites. So here's the honest version.
Short answer: probably yes - but not because Facebook is rubbish. A Facebook page does one job genuinely well. The trouble is that running a trade needs about four jobs doing, and a Facebook page can only really manage the one.
What a Facebook page is actually good at
Let's give it its due, because plenty of trades have built a solid business off one and there's no sense pretending otherwise.
A Facebook page is very good at showing recent work to people who already know you exist. You finish a bathroom, you take three photos, you post them. Your existing customers see it, your mate's cousin sees it, somebody comments "looks smart that", and occasionally one of them messages you about their own bathroom. That's a real channel and it costs you nothing but the ten seconds it took to post.
It's also low-effort and familiar. You've already got the app. There's no login you've forgotten, no hosting to think about, nobody to ring when it breaks. For a lot of trades that's exactly why the website has stayed on the "one day" list for four years.
None of that is wrong. The problem isn't what a Facebook page does - it's the things it quietly can't do, which you tend not to notice because you never see the work you didn't win.
The four jobs it can't do for you
1. Being found by someone who doesn't already know you
This is the big one. Your Facebook page reaches people who already follow you, or who were shown a post because a friend interacted with it. That's a warm audience, and it's finite.
What it doesn't reach is the person sitting in their kitchen at nine o'clock at night typing "electrician near me" or "boiler repair Grantham" into their phone. That search is where the money is, because the person doing it has a problem right now and is actively looking to pay someone to fix it.
For those searches, two things decide whether you show up: your Google Business Profile, which feeds the map listings, and a website with proper pages for what you do and where you do it. A Facebook page competes badly for both. It isn't structured around your services and your patch - it's structured around a feed.
2. Answering the questions people have before they ring you
Before someone hands a stranger several thousand pounds and a key to their house, they want to know some fairly basic things. What exactly do you do? Do you cover my village or just the town? Are you insured? Are you qualified? Have you done a job like mine before? Roughly what am I looking at, cost-wise?
On a website those are pages, sitting there answering the question at midnight without you lifting a finger. On a Facebook page they're either buried in the About section nobody reads, or scattered across posts from 2023, or simply not there - so the customer's choice is to message you and wait, or to click the next result. A good number of them click the next result.
3. Looking like a business rather than a bloke
Slightly uncomfortable, this one, but it matters. There's a category of customer - the one spending real money, often the one you most want - who checks you out before they call. A tidy website with your work, your qualifications and your area on it reads as established. A Facebook page last updated in 2022, with a cover photo that's still a stock image of a hard hat, reads as might have packed it in.
That judgement takes about four seconds and you never get told it happened. You just don't get the call.
4. Being yours
Your Facebook page sits on somebody else's platform, under somebody else's rules. Pages get restricted, accounts get locked over something daft, reach gets throttled because the algorithm changed on a Tuesday. Most of the time nothing happens - but if it does, you've no way to fix it and nobody to ring.
A website is an asset you own outright. It's the one bit of your online presence that can't be taken away by a policy update, and it's the thing everything else - Facebook, your van signage, your Google listing - can point at.
The bit nobody warns you about: what happens after the enquiry
Here's the part that catches people out, and it's got nothing to do with Facebook versus website.
Say you fix the finding-you problem. The enquiries start coming in. Where do they go? For most trades the honest answer is: everywhere. A few in Messenger. A few by text. One on the answerphone. One that came through the website to an email address you check on Sundays. One your mate took down on the back of a delivery note.
And then the week gets busy, and somewhere in it a job quietly evaporates. Nobody decided to lose it. It just never got a quote, because nobody was quite sure whose turn it was, and by Thursday the customer had someone else booked in.
This is the expensive bit. Not the website, not the marketing - the leads you already paid to generate and then dropped between the enquiry and the quote. Every trade we talk to has a version of this story, usually told with a laugh and the phrase "did anyone ever ring that bloke back?"
So when you're weighing up whether you need a website, the more useful question is the one after it: when an enquiry does come in, where does it land, and who's responsible for it? A website that fires enquiries into a shared inbox nobody owns has solved half a problem. Somewhere for them to land - a list you work through, with quotes attached and nothing falling off the bottom - is the other half. That's the job our own system, Pipeline, does for us, and it's why we tend to set the two up together rather than hand over a website and wish you luck.
What "a website" actually needs to be for a trade
Let's kill a myth here, because it's the reason a lot of trades never get one: you do not need a big, expensive, forty-page thing with a booking engine and a blog you'll never write.
For most trades, enough is genuinely enough:
- What you do - a clear page per main service, in the words customers actually use. "Rewires", not "domestic electrical solutions".
- Proof you've done it - photos of real jobs. You already take these for Facebook. Same photos, better home.
- Where you work - the towns and villages you cover, written down. This is one of the highest-value pages on a local trade's site and it's the one most often missing.
- Who you are - qualifications, insurance, how long you've been at it, a photo of an actual human.
- How to get hold of you - phone number visible on every page, and a form that goes somewhere you'll definitely see.
- It has to work on a phone - because that's where nearly all of these people are. If it needs pinching and zooming, it's not doing its job. We've written about what mobile-friendly actually means if you want the detail.
That's a small, well-defined piece of work. It's not a five-figure project and anyone quoting you like it is one, without first asking what you need, is selling you something. If you're weighing up build options generally, custom website vs template website covers where each makes sense.
For a real example of roughly this shape, Precision Energy Services is a Sleaford electrician we built for - a handful of pages, built around local search, with the Google Business Profile sorted at the same time.
So do you scrap the Facebook page?
No. Genuinely, no. Keep it and stop asking it to do things it was never built for.
Use Facebook for what it's good at - finished jobs, before-and-afters, the occasional bit of personality - and let it keep you visible to people who already know you. Use the website as the place people land when they're actively looking to spend money, and as the thing you point everything else at. Put the website address on your van, your invoices and your Facebook page; put a link to your Facebook page on the website so people can see you're active.
They're not competing. One is a shop window on a street you don't own. The other is the shop.
A three-minute check you can do right now
Don't take our word for any of this. Get your phone out and try these:
- Search your own trade and town - "plumber Grantham", or whatever yours is. Are you anywhere? Are your competitors? What have they got that you haven't?
- Google your business name. What comes up first, and is it accurate? Is there an old listing with a number you stopped using in 2019?
- Open your Facebook page as a customer would. How quickly can you find what you charge for, which areas you cover, and a phone number? Time it. If it's over thirty seconds, that's your answer.
- Count last month's enquiries and last month's quotes. If the second number is meaningfully smaller than the first, the gap is where your money is going - and it isn't a website problem.
Our honest take
If your Facebook page is bringing in enough work and you're comfortably booked out, you don't urgently need anything - carry on. Nobody should be scaring you into spending money.
But if you're relying on it as your only presence, you're invisible to the people searching for your trade tonight, you're asking customers to take you on trust with no evidence, and you're building on ground you don't own. That's a lot of risk to carry for the sake of a job that takes a couple of weeks to sort.
The two things worth doing, in order: get a small, proper website that answers the obvious questions and works on a phone, and make sure the enquiries it generates land somewhere they'll actually get followed up. One without the other is half a solution.
If you're a local trade and that sounds like a job worth ticking off, we run a fixed-price offer aimed squarely at exactly this - have a look at our website offer for local trades, or just get in touch and we'll give you an honest read on whether you need one at all.