A lot of businesses around here run almost entirely on Facebook. Your hours live on the page, customers message you there, and that’s the whole setup.
And it works! I’m not here to talk you out of it.
So do you really need a website if Facebook’s already working?
Here’s my straight answer. Yes. And it has almost nothing to do with how the site looks.
Not everybody’s on Facebook
Pew Research Center asked just over 5,000 adults about this in 2025, and 71 percent said they use Facebook. That’s a lot of people!
Three in ten aren’t on there at all, though. And plenty of the folks who are on there only use it to keep up with family. They’re not out searching Facebook for a plumber.
If Facebook’s your only front door, they’ve got no way in.
You don’t actually own your page
You’re borrowing it.
You can get locked out of your own account. An old employee can walk off with your admin access. Or you can wake up to a page that something automated decided to flag overnight. And when that happens, there’s no front desk to call.
And it’s not really the lost posts and reviews that hurt. It’s that every business card and sign you’ve ever paid to print is pointing at a page you can’t get into.
A website is yours. The domain’s yours, the files are yours, and if you ever decide to work with somebody else instead of me, you take all of it with you. I mean that.
Facebook gets to decide who sees your posts
You can write the clearest post in the world about your new hours and reach maybe a tenth of the people who follow you. That’s not Facebook being mean to you. It’s just how a feed works.
Your own site doesn’t work that way. It just sits there, all day, saying the same thing to anybody who comes looking. Nobody has to catch it at the right moment.
Google treats a website differently
Most people around here start with Google. And Google actually spells this part out. In its own guidance on local ranking, it says how prominent your business looks is “based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.”
Your website is what all of that points at. It’s where your Google Business Profile sends people, and it’s the thing anybody who wants to link to you can actually link to. A Facebook page can’t do that, and it can’t give you a real page for every service you offer or every town you drive to. So read this one next to local SEO basics every small business owner should know. They’re the same project, really.
It’s just easier for a stranger to say yes
A Facebook page is a timeline. Newest thing first, whatever that happens to be. Somebody who’s never heard of you has to scroll and piece it together.
A website can answer things in the order people actually ask them:
- What do you do?
- Where do you work?
- What’s this going to run me?
- Can I see some of it?
- How do I get ahold of you?
That’s it. Five questions, and about five pages to answer them. That’s most of what I build for small businesses around here.
A few honest photos of real work will carry more weight than anything else on there, which I went on about in your website photos are doing more work than you think and you can see for yourself in the recent work.
And if money’s the thing holding you back, that’s normal, not a sign you’re doing this wrong. Start small on purpose. Here’s where I’d spend it first.
Keep the Facebook page. Really.
None of this is me telling you to walk away from social media. Facebook is good at what Facebook’s good at. Showing up in a neighbor’s feed. Sharing a job you’re proud of the day you finish it.
Facebook’s the front porch. It’s friendly, it’s where people wave at you, and it’s not where you keep anything you can’t replace. The website is the house.
You want both. You just want to own one of them.
And if you’re wondering what building one actually involves, here’s how I work.
If your business is living on Facebook right now and you’d like a spot online that’s actually yours, let’s talk about a simple website.
