A Facebook page is not a website
Plenty of good Island businesses run entirely on a Facebook page. It is free, it is where people already are, and it works — right up until the day it does not. Here is what a page cannot do, and when it is genuinely enough.
Plenty of good businesses on this Island run entirely on a Facebook page. It costs nothing, it is where people already are, and if you post decent photos and answer messages quickly it genuinely works.
Until the day it does not. Usually that day arrives in one of three ways: the page gets restricted for a reason nobody can explain, reach quietly falls off a cliff, or a customer who wanted to check you out at ten at night could not find anything and rang someone else instead.
You are renting, and the landlord does not take calls
A page is not an asset you own. It sits on someone else's platform, under terms that change without notice, and it can be restricted or removed by an automated system with no warning. When that happens your route of appeal is a web form.
That is not a hypothetical. Ask around locally and you will find at least one business that lost a page with several thousand followers and had no way to reach any of them, because the audience was never theirs. It belonged to the platform.
If your entire customer route to you sits inside an account you do not control, you have a single point of failure with a support form attached.
People do not search Facebook for a tradesperson
When someone needs an electrician in Ryde, they open Google. They do not open Facebook and use its search. Your page can technically appear in Google results, but it is competing with the platform's own structure, it carries none of your keywords in a form Google likes, and you cannot change any of that.
A website you own can be built to answer exactly the question being typed. A page cannot.
What a page structurally cannot do
- Set out your prices clearly. Buried in a post from March, they may as well not exist.
- Take a proper enquiry. A message at 11pm saying "hi" is not a lead. A form that asks for the job, the address and a rough budget is.
- Keep your best work findable. Everything on a page is a feed. Last year's best job is thirty scrolls back.
- Carry the dull essentials. Terms, guarantees, insurance, registration numbers, the things a cautious customer looks for before spending four figures.
- Be the thing on your van. A domain reads as a business. A page URL reads as a hobby.
The trust gap is real, and it is getting wider
People check. Before letting someone into their house, or paying a deposit, most will spend two minutes looking you up. A real site with real photographs, a phone number that works and a page explaining how you actually operate settles that in seconds.
No site at all does not read as neutral. It reads as either very new or not quite real. Neither helps you when the person is deciding between you and the two other quotes on the table.
When a page genuinely is enough
To be fair about it: sometimes it is. If you are booked solid on word of mouth, not looking for more work, and the page is a courtesy rather than a shopfront, a website will not change your life. The same goes for a market stall, a seasonal sideline, or a hobby that pays for itself.
The question is not whether a page can work. It is whether you would be in trouble if it disappeared on a Tuesday.
The setup that actually works
You do not have to choose. The pairing that works for most small businesses is a small site as the permanent home and social as the feed that points at it.
- Five pages is plenty: what you do, how you work, previous jobs, pricing or a guide to it, and how to reach you.
- Put the enquiry form on it and make it send somewhere you actually read.
- Link the page to the site and the site to the page, so both feed each other.
- Keep posting to social. That does not stop. It just stops being the only thing you have.
The site is the bit nobody can take away from you. That is really the whole argument.