Plenty of trade businesses run for years on a Facebook page and a phone number, and do fine. So let me answer this properly rather than the way you would expect a bloke who builds websites to answer it.
When a Facebook page is enough
If all of the following are true, you probably do not need a website yet:
- Your work comes from word of mouth and repeat customers, and you are busy enough
- You are not trying to grow, or you are trying to get smaller and more selective
- You do not need to explain anything complicated before someone rings you
- You are not competing against anyone who does have a site
That is a real situation and there is nothing wrong with it. If that is you, spend the money on a better ladder.
The three points where it stops being enough
1. You do not own the audience
This is the one that matters most, and it has nothing to do with design.
Your Facebook page exists at Facebook’s discretion. The reach of your posts is set by an algorithm that changes without telling you, the followers you built up over five years can stop seeing you tomorrow, and if the account gets locked (which happens, usually at the worst possible moment) you have no way to reach any of those people.
A website you own does not do that. You own the domain, the content and the mailing list. Nobody can throttle it or lock you out of it. Every site I build is owned outright by the client, domain included, precisely so this never comes up.
2. You cannot answer the question people are actually asking
A Facebook page is a feed. It is very good at “here is a deck I finished last week” and very bad at “will this machine fit through my gate”, “do you cover my suburb”, “what does this cost roughly”, and “are you licensed”.
Those questions have to get answered somewhere, and if they do not get answered before someone rings you, they get answered on the phone, one caller at a time, including all the callers whose job you were never going to take.
The Matches Machinery Hire site is built almost entirely around this. There is a plain list of what people hire the excavator for, and it closes by inviting you to describe the job and promising a straight answer if it is the wrong machine. That page exists to turn away bad-fit enquiries, because a wasted delivery costs a day. You cannot build that in a feed.
3. Google mostly cannot send you work through it
Search for a trade and a suburb. Look at what comes back: a map pack, then a list of websites. Facebook pages turn up occasionally and well down the list, because a social profile gives Google almost nothing to work with: no service pages, no suburb pages, no structured data about what you do and where.
If you never want to appear in those results, fine. If you do, a Facebook page is not the tool.
What I would do first
This is the order I would spend money and effort in, and the website is not first:
- Claim and fill in your Google Business Profile properly. It is free, and for a local trade business it is the single highest-value thing on this list. Hours, service area, photos, categories, all of it.
- Get reviews onto that profile. Google reviews, specifically. Facebook reviews are nice but they do not feed the map pack.
- Then build the site, and point it at the same details as the profile so the two agree with each other.
I have written more about the Google Business Profile side of that decision, because it is the question underneath this one.
The short version
Keep the Facebook page. It is good for showing recent jobs, and the photos you already post there are half the content of a decent site anyway.
But if you are relying on it as your only presence, you are renting your customer relationships from a company that has never met you, and you are invisible to the person typing your trade and their suburb into Google right now.
If you want a straight answer about whether it is worth it for your situation, tell me what you do and I will tell you, even if the answer is not yet.