Do I need a website if I already have a Facebook page?
A Facebook page is proof of life, not a website. It cannot rank when somebody searches for your service, you do not own the audience or the page, and roughly half your potential customers will never see it. Keep the page, but it is not a substitute.
Plenty of contractors run real businesses off a Facebook page and nothing else. Bookings come in through Messenger, jobs get posted, the phone rings. If that is you, the question is fair: why pay for a website when the current setup works?
Here is the honest version, including what Facebook does better than your website will.
What a Facebook page genuinely does well
It proves you are alive. A page with a job posted last week tells somebody you are working. That is real, and a neglected website says the opposite loudly.
Messenger removes friction. Some people would rather message than call or fill in a form, and Facebook makes that effortless.
Sharing works. When a neighbor recommends you in a local group, your page is right there. Nothing on your website replicates that.
It costs nothing.
None of that is nothing. Keep the page.
What it cannot do
It cannot rank when somebody searches for your service
The big one. Type “roof repair near me” and you will get map listings and websites. You will not get Facebook pages, because Facebook pages do not compete in those results in any practical way.
Every one of those searches, every day, in your town, happens without you in the running. Those people are not browsing. They have a problem right now and are picking somebody from what they find. That is the single largest source of work most contractors are not touching, and a Facebook page cannot reach it.
About half your customers will never see it
Facebook skews older and its reach among people under forty has been falling for years. Plenty of homeowners have no account or never open it.
Those people still need painters. They search instead.
You do not own any of it
Your page, your followers and your reviews live on somebody else’s platform under rules that change without warning.
Pages get restricted by automated systems for reasons that are hard to appeal. Reach gets throttled to sell advertising. Ask anyone who built an audience on a platform and then watched the rules change.
Your website is yours. Your domain is yours. Nobody adjusts an algorithm and takes away your customers’ ability to find you.
Reach is metered
When you post, most of your followers do not see it. That is deliberate, because the reach you used to get free is now a product. Your website shows every visitor everything, every time.
It cannot be built to convert
A Facebook page is the same shape for a roofer as for a bakery. You cannot put your service list where you want it, or a quote form that asks the right questions, or your reviews above the fold, or a click-to-call button that follows people down the page. You get Facebook’s layout.
A website is arranged entirely around getting somebody to contact you. That is the whole reason it exists.
The comparison
| Facebook page | Website | |
|---|---|---|
| Shows up in Google searches for your service | No | Yes |
| Reaches people not on Facebook | No | Yes |
| You own it | No | Yes |
| Costs nothing | Yes | No |
| Easy to share locally | Yes | Somewhat |
| Layout built to get the call | No | Yes |
| Survives a platform rule change | No | Yes |
What actually happens when somebody is referred to you
Worth walking through, because this is where the loss is invisible.
A neighbor gives your name. That person does not call immediately. They look you up first, almost everybody does.
If they find a Facebook page with recent work and good reviews, decent outcome. You will win a good share of these.
If they find a Facebook page and nothing else, some of them hesitate. Not because Facebook is bad, but because the absence of a website reads, fairly or not, as smaller and less established. Some of those people call the referral, some call somebody else.
You never hear about the ones who did not call. That is the point. This loss is completely invisible from inside the business, which is why it goes unfixed for years.
A website does not replace the referral. It stops the referral leaking.
The answer is both
Keep the Facebook page. Post your jobs, answer messages, stay in the local groups. It does things a website cannot.
Add a website so that:
- You can be found by people searching for your service instead of your name
- The people not on Facebook can find you at all
- Referred customers find something that confirms their neighbor’s judgment
- You own the thing your business depends on
Most contractors do not need to choose. They need the Facebook page they already have and roughly five pages of website.
The reason most people put it off
It is rarely the money. It is that a website means writing about your own business, digging out photos, and deciding what each page should say. There is always a job to quote instead. We have seen a lot of half-finished sites that stalled at the About page.
So we removed that step. We research your business, pull your real Google reviews, write the copy, and hand-build the finished site before you have paid anything or sat through a single meeting. Then we send you the link.
You look at your actual website, not a mockup, and decide. If it does not obviously beat what you have now, walk away and it costs you nothing. Most are live within a day of a yes, and your Facebook page carries on exactly as it is.
See what yours would look like. It takes about ten minutes of your time and no money to find out.