Is a Facebook page enough for your business in 2026? (What it can't do)

"I've already got a Facebook page, why would I pay for a website?" If I had a pound for every time a tradesperson has said that to me, I could stop building websites. It's the single most common objection I hear, and honestly, it deserves a proper answer rather than a sales pitch.

So here's the proper answer. I run Pixel Heaven, a one person studio in Wallingford that builds custom-coded websites for UK tradespeople and small businesses. Obviously I have a horse in this race. But I'll tell you up front: for some businesses, a Facebook page genuinely is enough, and I'll tell you exactly which ones before the end. For everyone else, there are five specific things a Facebook page cannot do, and at least one of them is probably costing you work right now.

01What a Facebook page does brilliantly

Let's start with credit where it's due, because the reason so many tradespeople rely on Facebook is that it actually works for certain things:

• Word of mouth amplification. When someone posts "can anyone recommend a decent plasterer?" in the village group and three people tag your page, that's the modern version of the best marketing there has ever been. Facebook is genuinely unbeatable at this.
• Local community presence. Village groups, town noticeboards, "spotted in..." pages. This is where a lot of small-town Britain actually talks, and being visible there matters.
• Posting job photos. Snap the finished patio, post it in thirty seconds from your phone, done. No website makes photo sharing that frictionless.
• It's free. No hosting, no domain, no developer. Hard to argue with the price.
• Messenger. Some customers, especially ones who found you through a group, genuinely prefer firing off a quick message to filling in a form or phoning.

If you take one thing from this article, don't let it be "delete your Facebook page". Keep it. Post to it. It's doing a real job. The question is whether it's doing every job, and that's where it gets uncomfortable.

02Problem one: you don't own it

Your Facebook page lives on Meta's property, under Meta's rules, and those rules change without asking you. Three ways this bites real businesses:

The algorithm decides who sees your posts. When you post to your page, Facebook shows it to a fraction of the people who follow you, and that fraction has been shrinking for years. The exact figure moves around and Meta doesn't publish it, but marketers who track this consistently report that unpaid page posts typically reach a small single-digit percentage of followers. Either way, the direction of travel is clear: Facebook would rather you paid to boost the post. Your "audience of 800 followers" is really an audience of whoever the algorithm feels like showing it to this week.

Accounts get locked, and appealing is miserable. I've watched a business lose access to a page they'd spent years building because of a flagged login, and the appeal process was a maze of automated dead ends. There's no phone number to ring. If Meta's systems decide your account is suspicious, your entire online presence can vanish overnight, along with every review, photo and follower on it.

The platform can simply change. Features you rely on get retired, page layouts get reshuffled, reach gets throttled. You have no vote. A website is the opposite: your domain, your files, your rules. If you leave your web designer (including me), the site comes with you.

03Problem two: Google barely sees it

This is the big one, and it's the gap most page-only businesses never notice because it's invisible from inside Facebook.

Think about how a new customer, someone who doesn't already know you, actually finds a tradesperson. They don't scroll Facebook hoping a builder drifts past. They pull out their phone and Google "builder Didcot" or "emergency plumber Wallingford". What comes up? The Google map pack, then a page of proper websites. Facebook pages almost never appear for those searches. Some of that is because so much of Facebook sits behind a login, some of it is how Google treats social platforms, but the practical result is simple: for the searches that bring in strangers, your Facebook page might as well not exist.

Meanwhile, the competitor with a half-decent website is sitting on page one collecting the enquiries. Not because they're better at the job than you. Because they're findable and you aren't. I've written about how fast that gap can be closed in how to rank on Google in 90 days, and if you've ever typed your own business name in and winced, why isn't my business on Google covers the usual causes.

One partial patch worth doing today whatever you decide about a website: a free Google Business Profile gets you into the map pack, and it works alongside a Facebook page. But the map pack rewards businesses with a linked website, steady reviews and consistent details, so on its own it only takes you so far.

04Problem three: every Facebook page looks the same

Open the pages of five local builders. Same blue header, same layout, same buttons, same fonts. The only differences are the profile photo and the cover image. Facebook is designed that way on purpose: it's Meta's brand, not yours.

For a £150 job, that doesn't matter. For a £5,000 extension, a £15,000 landscaping project or a commercial contract, it matters a lot, because at that price the customer is comparing you against two or three other quotes and looking for reasons to trust one of you. Here's the moment I keep hearing about from clients after the fact: the customer had the quotes in hand, Googled each business name, and one of them had a proper website with photos of finished work, reviews and a real address, and the others had a Facebook page or nothing. Guess who felt safest to hand five grand to.

That's not vanity. A website is the online equivalent of a sign-written van versus turning up in an unmarked one. Both drivers might be brilliant, but one of them looks established before a word is spoken. On a website you also control the running order: your best project first, your reviews where they'll be seen, your prices presented the way you want. On Facebook, your latest post is whatever you happened to post last Tuesday, and your reviews sit wherever Meta decided to put them this year.

05Problem four: the people who never see Facebook at all

It's easy to assume everyone's on Facebook because everyone you know is. But think about who actually books the biggest jobs: homeowners in their 40s, 50s and 60s. Plenty of them have a dormant account they check twice a year, or none at all. And even active users hit a wall you might never have seen yourself: click through to a Facebook page while logged out and you're nagged to sign in, with chunks of the page hidden behind the prompt.

Every one of those people, the retired couple planning a kitchen, the landlord with three properties, the office manager choosing a contractor, can open a website. No login, no app, no account. A page-only business is invisible to a slice of exactly the demographic that spends the most.

06Problem five: enquiries leak

On Facebook, an enquiry is usually a comment ("how much for something like this?") or a Messenger ping. Comments get buried, Messenger messages from non-friends can land in a hidden requests folder, and there's no structure: no job type, no postcode, no phone number unless you ask for each one by hand. You end up playing twenty questions with every lead, and the ones you miss for two days often go quiet, because someone else answered first.

A proper contact form asks for name, number, job type and a line about the work, then drops the whole thing into your email before you've said a word. It works at 11pm. It works while you're up a ladder. And alongside a visible phone number and a WhatsApp link, it gives every kind of customer their preferred way in. If you've got a site already and the form's gone quiet, that's usually fixable too; I've broken down the common causes in why your website isn't getting enquiries.

07Who genuinely IS fine with just Facebook

I promised honesty, so here it is. There are businesses for which a website would be a waste of money, and if you're one of them I'd rather tell you now than take £100 off you:

• Hobby and side-hustle sellers. If you bake cakes for the village, sell crafts at fairs or flip furniture at weekends, Facebook (and Marketplace) is your natural habitat. Your customers are already there and your order volume doesn't justify running costs.
• Community groups and clubs. A Sunday league team, a toddler group, an allotment society. The page is the noticeboard. Perfect as it is.
• Tradespeople at full capacity who don't want to grow. This one's real and underrated. If you're booked four months out purely on word of mouth, you turn work away weekly and you like it that way, a website solves a problem you don't have. Carry on.

08The right answer for most: both, doing different jobs

This isn't actually Facebook versus a website. The businesses doing best out of the ones I work with run both, and each covers the other's blind spot:

In practice the loop looks like this: the Facebook page keeps you present in the community and feeds word of mouth. The website catches the Google searches from strangers, passes the credibility check on bigger quotes, and turns both streams into structured enquiries. Someone gets tagged in a group, clicks through, sees a link to a proper site, and the quote conversation starts from "these people look established" instead of "are they still trading?".

And the site doesn't need to be a twenty page monster. For most trades, a fast five-to-eight page site (home, services, photos of work, reviews, about, contact) does the whole job. I've covered what that should actually cost in how much a small business website costs in the UK, because this is the other place people get burned: agencies quoting £3,000 for what is, honestly, a week's work.

09Bottom line

A Facebook page is a genuinely good tool that has quietly been sold to small businesses as a complete online presence, and it isn't one. It's the community half. The other half, being found by strangers on Google, owning your own ground, and looking like a safe pair of hands when someone's about to spend serious money, is a job Facebook structurally cannot do, no matter how often you post.

If you're a hobby seller, a club, or a tradesperson happily booked solid on word of mouth: you're fine, keep the page, spend the money on tools instead. If you want work from people who don't already know you, run both. The page feeds the community; the site catches Google and closes the bigger jobs. For the fuller version of the "do I even need one?" question, I've written it up separately: do tradespeople actually need a website?

Common questions I get

"Can't I just boost posts instead of getting a website?"

Boosting buys temporary reach inside Facebook. It doesn't put you in front of someone Googling "roofer + your town", and the moment you stop paying, it stops. Ads and a website aren't substitutes; one rents attention, the other builds an asset.

"Will a website replace my Facebook page?"

No, and it shouldn't. Keep posting job photos to the page; it's your community channel. The site links to it, and the page links back. They do different jobs.

"I had a website years ago and it did nothing."

Very common, and usually it was a slow template site with no local search structure, which is a website in the same way a van with no engine is transport. If you want a second opinion on an existing site, my free website check will tell you straight what's wrong, if anything.

"How do I know you're not just saying all this to sell me a website?"

Fair challenge. Two answers: first, section 07 above names the businesses I think shouldn't buy one, which isn't a great sales tactic. Second, the results page shows real client outcomes rather than promises, and the preview below means you see the actual site before any money moves.