Website, or just Facebook?

When Facebook on its own is fine

If you're a one-person business, your customers all come from the local community page, your work is visual, and your enquiries arrive as messages you're happy to answer on your phone, then you may genuinely not need a website yet. Mobile hairdressers, bakers, dog walkers, people selling at markets. The page is doing the job.

I'd rather tell you that than take £450 off you for something you don't need. Spend the hour on your Google Business Profile instead. For a local business that's usually the better first move.

Three things a Facebook page can't do

Be found by people who aren't on Facebook. When someone searches "electrician Largs" on Google, social pages rarely come up well, and a good number of people never see them at all. You're invisible to anyone not already in that app.

Belong to you. The page is on loan. The rules change, the reach changes, and accounts do occasionally get locked with no warning and no one to phone. If that page is your entire business presence, you're one automated decision away from having no presence. It happens often enough that it's worth not risking.

Say everything at once. Prices, opening hours, the full list of what you do, a proper gallery, a booking form that fills your diary while you're working. On a page, that's all buried under whatever you posted most recently.

The bit people underestimate

Trust. Not a fashionable thing to say, but it's real: for anything where someone's handing over money or letting you into their house, having your own site changes how you're read. It's the difference between someone who does a bit of this and a business.

There's a newer angle too. People increasingly ask ChatGPT and similar tools for recommendations, and those tools read websites. If your details only exist inside a social app, you're not in the answer.

So keep both

This isn't website versus Facebook. They do different jobs. The page is where you talk to people who already know you: the day's specials, the photo of the finished job, the "closed Tuesday" post. The website is where people who've never heard of you find out whether you're what they're after, and then get in touch.

Point them at each other. Website link in the page's about section, social links on the site.

A reasonable first step

You don't need to start big. One good page that says who you are, what you do and the area you cover, with photographs of real work and an obvious way to contact you, does the job for a lot of businesses, and it's the £450 option. You can add to it later when there's a reason to.

If you're not sure which side of the line you're on, get in touch and describe the business. I'll give you a straight answer, including "not yet" if that's the honest one.