Is Facebook enough, or do you need a website?
A Facebook page is enough while every job comes by word of mouth and you have more work than you want. It stops being enough the day a stranger searches for what you do and finds a competitor instead, because a Facebook page does not come up for that search and cannot be found by anyone who is not already on Facebook.
Most of the small businesses we research run entirely on Facebook or Instagram. No website, no domain, just the page. And for some of them, honestly, it works. Jobs come through word of mouth, people message the page, the diary stays full.
This is where the line sits, as plainly as we can put it.
What the page does well
Photos of your work, posted in thirty seconds. Reviews and recommendations from real people. Messages straight to your phone. Free.
If your work spreads by people tagging you in "anyone know a good..." threads, the page is earning its keep. Keep it.
Where it fails you
Search. When someone types your trade and their town into Google, pages rank far behind websites. The people who already know your name find you. The people who do not, find whoever has a site.
You do not own it. We have watched a busy business page get quietly restricted with no warning and no appeal that goes anywhere. The followers, the reviews, the years of posts all sit on someone else's platform, under someone else's rules. A locked page takes your whole online presence with it.
The algorithm decides who sees you. You post, and some fraction of your followers see it. Which fraction is not up to you.
AI search cannot read it. When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a business like yours, it reads websites. A Facebook page is largely invisible to it, so you are not in the answer.
Everyone looks the same. A page has one layout. A customer comparing you against two competitors with real websites is comparing a profile against two shopfronts.
The two questions that decide it
Where does your next customer come from? If the honest answer is always word of mouth, the page may carry you for years. If any of them come from searching, you are handing those ones to competitors.
What happens if the page dies tomorrow? If the answer is "I would lose everything", that is the problem. A website and a domain in your own name cannot be taken away by a moderation decision.
What we would do
Keep the page. It is good at what it is good at.
Put a small website behind it: your work, your reviews, a way to contact you that does not depend on anyone's algorithm, and a domain that belongs to you. Link the two together. The page feeds the site, the site catches the searches the page never could.
If you are not sure which side you are on
Send us your page or your domain and we will tell you straight what someone searching for your trade finds today. A painter who ran on Instagram alone is a good picture of what changes. It costs nothing.
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The free things that matter most, in the order worth doing them, including the one nearly everyone misses.
How much does a website cost in Ireland?
The ranges quoted across the market, what pushes a quote up or down, and what a yearly fee buys once the site is live.
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