Website vs Facebook for a fencing contractor Six ran on Facebook. Sixty-seven ran on nothing at all

Six businesses in 234 gave Google a Facebook page

Of 234 trade businesses checked across Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton, 156 listed their own domain, 67 listed no website at all, and 11 listed something that was not theirs. Six of those eleven were Facebook pages.

The table is the whole argument in one block. The Facebook-only tradesman is a real creature and there are six of him in this sample, but he is heavily outnumbered by the tradesman with nothing, and outnumbered twenty-six to one by the tradesman with a proper site. If you are currently sending customers to a Facebook page, your genuine competition is not the other Facebook pages. It is the 156.

How the sweep was done

These are real listings pulled off Google for 18 trades across three Shropshire market towns, then deduplicated by business name and phone number, because plenty of firms appear under two towns or two trades. That takes 333 listing rows down to 234 distinct businesses. For each one I read the website field exactly as Google had it and sorted it into own domain, nothing, or somebody else's platform. No business is named here.

What the count does not prove

It is one corner of England and it is not large. Three rural market towns will not behave like Manchester, and 234 businesses is a sample rather than a census. It also reads the Google listing only, so a firm with a website it never told Google about shows up here as having none, which is its own kind of problem but a different one. What the sample is good for is the ratio, and the ratio is lopsided enough that a bigger sweep is unlikely to flip it.

Five of the twelve fencing contractors had no site of their own

Twelve distinct fencing contractors appeared across the three towns. Seven listed their own domain, two listed nothing, one listed a Facebook page, and two shared free Wix subdomains.

Twelve is a small number and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the shape of it is worth naming, because fencing is a trade where the customer almost always gets two or three quotes, and where the job is visible from the road for years afterwards. Five of twelve arriving at that comparison with no address of their own is a lot of ground given away before anybody has priced anything.

The two on free Wix subdomains are the detail I keep thinking about. Both had the platform's name sitting inside their web address instead of their own business name. That is an address which is awkward to read out on the phone, awkward to paint on a van, and not something you keep if you ever move. It costs very little to fix and almost nothing to leave broken, which is exactly why it stays broken.

What Facebook does well, and the two things it cannot do

A Facebook page is a good place to show finished fencing to people who already know you, and a poor place to be found by somebody who does not.

Give Facebook its due. Posting a finished run of close-board the same afternoon takes thirty seconds, people who follow you see it, and the comments under a local job do real work. For a contractor whose diary fills from neighbours and repeat customers, that is a functioning marketing channel and it is free.

It does not answer the search

The customer who has just moved in and needs sixty metres of fencing does not open Facebook. They open Google and type the trade and the town. Google's own guidance on local ranking puts weight on relevance, distance and prominence, and describes adding complete business information so Google can better understand and match your business to searches (Google Business Profile Help). A page you cannot structure, cannot add service or area detail to, and cannot control the wording of is a thin thing to hand that process. Where the search actually starts now, and what it checks before anyone rings, is covered in how customers find trades in 2026.

It is not yours

The second problem is ownership, and it is the one that only matters on the day it matters. The page lives on somebody else's platform under somebody else's rules. A locked account, a changed policy or a hacked login takes your entire shopfront with it, and there is no support number in Shropshire to ring. A domain you own and a site you hold the files to cannot be switched off by a third party in the same way.

The trades that skip a website are the ones that live on referral

Across the 18 trades in the sweep, the no-website rate runs from 50% of electricians and 47% of carpenters down to 5% of roofers, and it tracks almost exactly how much of the trade's work arrives by recommendation.

Electricians, carpenters, painters and builders sit at the top of that list, between 42% and 50% with no site at all. Roofers, tilers and fencing contractors sit at the bottom. The pattern is not that some trades are behind the times. It is that a carpenter with twenty years of local relationships genuinely does not need to be found by a stranger very often, and a roofer, whose customer is usually in an unplanned hurry with no existing contact, does.

Fencing sits closer to the roofers on that scale than to the carpenters, at 17% with nothing listed. That is the honest reason a fencing contractor should not copy a carpenter's setup. It is also why the trades with a specific thing to prove tend to build properly: an installer with a certification number and a grant to explain has no way of doing that on a social post, which is the whole subject of what a heat pump installer's website should show and of what a solar installer website costs in the UK.

Reviews are not the gap

One thing the no-website group is not short of is proof. Of the 67 businesses with no site, 39 had a readable Google review count, the median was seven and fifteen of them had twenty or more. One had 232. These are established firms with years of satisfied customers and nowhere to send anybody who wants to read more than a star rating.

What it costs to stop being one of the 67

A done-for-you fencing website from Sitework is £50 every four weeks with no build fee, which works out at £650 across a year because it is thirteen payments rather than twelve.

Set that against one fencing job. If a garden run is worth several hundred pounds and a bigger contract considerably more, the site pays for its own year on the first or second job it brings in that would otherwise have gone to one of the 156. Groundwork at £100 every four weeks adds town and service pages and a monthly Google Business Profile post, which starts earning once you cover several towns rather than one. What the build actually looks like for outdoor trades is on the gardener and landscaper website design page.

Keep the page. Stop making it the destination

The right setup for a fencing contractor is a Facebook page that feeds a website, not a Facebook page standing in for one.