Plenty of good local businesses run on a Facebook page and nothing else. The page is free, customers already have the app, and messages arrive on the phone in your pocket. The question is not whether that works. It is what you are relying on when it does.
Who owns the audience
Your followers are Facebook’s users before they are your customers. You can post to them, but whether a post reaches them is Facebook’s decision, made per person, every time.
Meta says so plainly in its own explanation of Feed ranking: “most people have more content in their Feed than they could possibly browse in one session”, so a ranking system picks and orders what each person sees, mixes in recommended content and ads, and makes people “less likely to see multiple posts from the same Groups or from the same Page in a row”.
None of that is sinister. It is how a feed with billions of users has to work. But it means a follower count is not an audience you can address. It is a pool of people Facebook may show your posts to, if it judges them worth showing.
On your own website nothing stands between a visitor and the page. What it says is what they read.
What happens when you lose the account
A Facebook page is not a separate login. It is managed through the personal Facebook accounts of the people given access to it, and Meta’s help centre is direct about what that means: a Page must have at least one person with full control to remain active, and if nobody has that any more it “will be automatically deactivated and scheduled for deletion”.
Personal accounts get suspended. Sometimes for a reason, sometimes by mistake, sometimes because the account was hacked and used for something it should not have been. Meta’s page on suspended or disabled accounts says you can appeal within 180 days, and that if you do not, or the appeal fails, the account is permanently disabled.
If the business page hangs off one person’s account, the business presence is only as safe as that one account. Two things reduce the risk on Facebook itself: give full control to a second trusted person, and turn on two-factor authentication for everyone with access. Neither changes the underlying arrangement, which is that the platform can close the door and you will be appealing to it from outside.
A website on a domain registered in your name does not work like that. Hosts can fail and suppliers can go out of business, but the address is yours, and you can point it somewhere else. Who owns your domain is worth five minutes of checking, because a site on an address somebody else registered has the same problem as a page on somebody else’s account.
Being found by people who have not heard of you
Followers already know you exist. New customers mostly do not, and they find local businesses by searching: “plumber near me”, “cake shop Wirral”, “emergency electrician Chester”.
That search shows two things. The map results come from Google Business Profiles, which you can have with or without a website, and how to get on Google Maps covers setting one up. Below the map are web pages, and a page that answers the question someone typed is what gets listed there.
A Facebook page is one page, written as a feed. A website can have a page for each service and each area you cover, each one describing exactly what someone might be searching for. That is not a promise of a position, which nobody can sell you. It is the difference between having something for Google to show and having nothing.
A website also gives your Business Profile somewhere to send people. The profile has a field for a website, and a Facebook page in it is better than nothing, but it asks the person who tapped it to scroll a feed to find out what you do.
Reviews
Facebook has recommendations, and they help with people who are already on your page. When somebody searches Google for a local business, though, the reviews shown next to your name in the map results are Google’s own, not Facebook’s.
They are worth asking for whichever way you go. How to get more Google reviews covers asking without making it awkward. A website can then show a selection of them, link to the rest, and put them next to the service they are about, which a feed cannot do.
What a website does that a page cannot
- It says the same thing to everybody. Your prices, your area, your hours and how to book are on a page that does not scroll away under last week’s post.
- It answers questions before they are asked. “Do you cover Neston?” “Do you do evenings?” A page per answer saves you a message per question.
- It works for people who are not on Facebook. Not everyone has an account, and not everyone wants to log in to see a business.
- It reads like a business. A feed of photos reads differently from a page with prices, an area and an accreditation number on it, and somebody choosing between two quotes is reading both.
When a Facebook page alone is enough
It genuinely is for some businesses, and it is better to say so than to sell them something they do not need.
- Your work is all repeat and referral. If the diary is full from people who already know you, and you are not trying to reach anyone new, search matters less.
- The business is the community. A club, a market stall that sells to the same regulars, a village group. People find you through each other, and Facebook is where they already are.
- You are testing an idea. Before you know whether it will last a year, a free page is the sensible place to start.
- You have a Google Business Profile and keep it right. For a business that mostly gets found on the map, a well-kept profile does much of what a small website would.
If you are in one of those, keep the Facebook page, keep the Google profile current, and revisit the question when you want customers you do not yet know.
If you want both
Having a website is no reason to close the Facebook page. They do different jobs: the page is where your existing customers see what you are up to, and the site is where new ones find out who you are. Post the job photos on Facebook, and put the best of them on the site, where they stay.
Our plans and what each includes are on pricing. If you have a quote from anybody, how to read a website quote goes through what to ask.
If you want someone to look at your own website, the free review tells you the three things we would change first.
