If your phone rings because someone's neighbour recommended you, and your Facebook page has years of finished jobs on it, then the honest answer to 'do I need a website?' is: not to survive. Plenty of busy trades have never had one, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
So this is not the usual argument that Facebook is a waste of time. It is not. It is where your existing customers already are, it costs nothing, and the work you post there gets seen. The question worth asking is narrower: what does a website do that a Facebook page cannot?
It gets found by someone who has never heard of you
Word of mouth only reaches people who know someone who knows you. Search works the other way round: a stranger three streets away types 'joiner near me' at nine at night, and the businesses that come up get the call. Your Google Business Profile is what puts you in that list, and it wants a website to link to. Getting onto Google Maps is the first half of that job. Having somewhere to send people is the second.
You own it, and nobody can switch it off
A Facebook page is rented. Accounts get locked and pages get hacked, and people lose ten years of photos and reviews with nobody to appeal to. Even when nothing goes wrong, the platform decides who sees your posts. A website sits on a domain in your name, looks the same to everyone, and cannot be suspended by an algorithm.
It is what a bigger customer checks before ringing
This is the one most trades underestimate. A homeowner will happily hire on a recommendation. A developer, a housebuilder, a letting agent or a commercial client will look you up first, and they are checking whether you can handle their job: insurance, registration, the scale of work you have done, and whether anyone will answer. A Facebook page does not answer those questions in the order they get asked.
It takes an enquiry at midnight
Most enquiries are not urgent, just inconvenient. Someone decides at midnight that they want a quote for an extension. On Facebook they message and wait, or they forget by morning. A site can take the detail while it is fresh: what they want, where they are, a photo of the problem, and a number for you to ring back.
Word of mouth brings you the people who already know someone like you. A website is for everyone else.
Keep the Facebook page
- Keep posting the work there. That is what it is good at.
- Link the page to your website, so the two feed each other.
- Ask for Google reviews as well as Facebook ones, because Google reviews are what show in the map results.
- Keep the phone number identical on the page, the website and the Google profile. Mismatched details make one business look like three.
So do you need one?
If you are comfortably busy on recommendations and you do not want a different kind of customer, then no, and we will say so on the phone. If you want work that does not depend on who your last customer knows, or you are going after bigger jobs where being checked out is part of the process, that is when a site earns its money.
D. Callaghan Joiners & Builders had fifty years of word of mouth in Bathgate and nowhere to send anyone. That is the usual starting point, and it is a good one: the reputation already exists, the site just gives it somewhere to live.
If you want a straight answer for your own business, tell us what you do and how the work comes in at the moment. Sometimes the honest answer is that a Google profile and a tidy phone number would do more for you this year than a website, and we will tell you that too.