Website or just a Facebook page? What trades need

Facebook is the first thing most tradespeople set up, and for good reason. It's free, it takes ten minutes, and the first few jobs probably did come through it. But roughly 7 in 10 people searching for a local tradesperson start on Google, not Facebook. If your business only exists on Meta's platform, you are invisible to the majority of potential customers before they've even heard your name.

That gap is where jobs go. Not to Checkatrade. Not to the bloke down the road. To whoever shows up first when someone types "plumber near me" at half nine on a Tuesday night. A Facebook page does not appear in those results, it never has. The customers who are ready to book, not browse or recommend but actually pick up the phone and book, almost always start with a Google search. If you're not there, those calls never happen.

Facebook is genuinely useful, up to a point

Facebook does real work for a sole-trader trade business: it shows social proof, lets you post before-and-afters, and keeps you in front of people who already know you.

It costs nothing. Setting up a business page takes an afternoon. And if you have a few hundred local followers, the odd job will drop into your DMs without any further effort. That is a real benefit, not nothing.

What Facebook does well

Community groups are particularly useful. A recommendation in a local Facebook group, "anyone know a good sparkie?", can generate three enquiries before the day is out. You can respond in real time, post project photos, and collect reviews from customers who are already on the platform. For trades that run on repeat custom and personal reputation, that loop works well.

The hard ceiling on Facebook reach

Here is the problem: Meta decides who sees your posts. Organic reach on a business page has fallen steadily since Facebook introduced paid promotion, and the algorithm prioritises content from friends and family over business pages. You can spend genuine time posting good content and most of your followers will never see it. You don't control the channel, you rent space in it. If Meta changes something, your entire reach can collapse overnight.

Facebook is not a substitute for search

When someone has a leak, a fuse blowing, a fence down, or a bathroom they want replaced, they don't scroll Facebook. They go to Google and type what they need. ONS Internet Users data confirms that over 90% of UK adults use the internet daily, and almost all of them reach for Google first when they need a local service. A Facebook page does not appear in those results. Google Business Profile can get you on the map, but even that is only half the picture. The enquiry that starts with "plumber in [town]" on Google will never find you on Facebook.

What it costs a tradesman to have no website

A trade business with no website loses Google enquiries by default: there is no page to rank, no phone number to surface in Search, and no way for a customer to read your reviews or see your work before calling.

This isn't a theoretical loss. Every week, someone in your area searches for the service you offer. That search produces results. The top results get calls. If you don't have a website, your name is not in those results at all, not on page two, not buried somewhere, simply absent. The work goes to whoever shows up.

The missed Google enquiry

A missed call on a Tuesday afternoon could be a £2,000 bathroom refit, a full rewire, or a £400 fence job that turns into an annual garden contract. These aren't abstract losses, they are enquiries going to whoever is on page one. Without a website, that ground has been surrendered permanently. You can't rank for a keyword without a page for Google to index.

Checkatrade and MyBuilder don't fill the gap

Lead platforms like Checkatrade, MyBuilder, and Rated People do put you in front of paying customers. But they charge between £70 and £120 per month, and you're competing against every other trade in your area on the same page. A customer who finds you on Checkatrade is also looking at four other profiles at the same moment. A customer who finds your own website and calls has already made a decision. See do tradesmen need a website in 2026 for the full cost comparison across the options.

You don't own your Facebook audience

If Meta changes its algorithm, restricts business pages, or simply becomes less popular in your area, your entire online presence disappears with it. A website lives on a domain you own and control. Your Facebook page exists at Meta's discretion. The guide on getting more work without paying for leads makes the same point about lead platforms, owning your own channel is the only way to build something that compounds over time instead of renting attention that can be taken away.

Who genuinely doesn't need a website

A tradesperson fully booked via word of mouth, with no capacity for new customers and no plans to grow, does not need a website right now, though that position can change faster than expected.

This is worth saying plainly. If you are a one-man band with a twelve-week waiting list and you want to stay that way, the returns on a website are limited. You might still benefit, better-quality enquiries, fewer time-wasters, but it is not urgent.

The sole trader with no bandwidth

Gov.uk's guidance for sole traders doesn't include anything about marketing, because plenty of skilled tradespeople run profitable businesses on referrals alone, particularly in specialist niches. If every job comes from the last one and the phone doesn't stop, a website is a nice-to-have rather than an urgent fix.

The exception: when word of mouth dries up

Word-of-mouth referral chains break. A key customer moves away. A period of illness. A local housing market that goes cold. A wet winter that kills off garden work. Any of these can empty a diary in six weeks. The tradespeople who struggle most in that scenario are the ones who have never built an independent online presence. A website is also an insurance policy, you don't need it until you need it, and then you need it immediately.

The honest test

Ask yourself: if every customer I have today stopped referring, where would tomorrow's work come from? If the answer is "I don't know" or "Facebook groups, I suppose", that's the answer. The pipeline you control is a website. Everything else is borrowed.

The real objections to getting a website

The four most common objections, cost, time, "I'm not technical", and "I already get enough work", are each answerable, but they're worth taking seriously rather than dismissing.

"It's too expensive"

A custom website from an agency can run to £2,000, £5,000, which is a fair reason to hesitate. But a done-for-you hand-coded one-pager is a one-off £600 then £20 a month, with the build, hosting, domain, SSL and unlimited small changes all included. Compare that to £70, £120 per month on Checkatrade, paid every month whether the leads are good or not, with the enquiries shared. For around the same money you get a website that's yours alone and sends every enquiry straight to you.

"I don't have time to maintain it"

You don't need to. A well-built static website needs almost no maintenance, the content doesn't expire, your phone number doesn't change every month, and you're not expected to post three times a week. Managed hosting included covers unlimited small changes, so if you get a new van number or add a service area, that's handled. You update Facebook; someone else updates the website.

"I don't know what to put on it"

Most tradespeople overthink this. A website for a sole trader needs five things: what you do, where you work, a phone number, a few photos, and some reviews. It doesn't need a blog. It doesn't need a price calculator. It doesn't need anything beyond those five elements to start converting visitors into callers. For getting found once you have a site, the guide to getting your trade business on Google covers every step.

"I already get enough work"

If that's genuinely true today, consider whether it will be true in a lean month, or when you want to raise your rates, or when you want to stop taking on every job and start choosing the better ones. A website filters enquiries, a customer who has already read your page, seen your gallery and checked your reviews before calling is a better-prepared, higher-trust enquiry than a cold DM from a Facebook group. It shifts the quality of the pipeline, not just the volume.

A simple site and Facebook beats Facebook alone

A trade business that runs both a website and a Facebook page captures two different audiences, Google searchers and Facebook community members, for a one-off £600 build then £20 a month and ten minutes of admin.

Facebook is a community tool. It keeps you warm with people who already know you. A website is an acquisition tool. It brings in people who have never heard of you but need exactly what you do. Neither replaces the other. The mistake is treating Facebook as a website substitute rather than the useful complement it actually is.

What a simple site needs to do

A one-page site for a sole trader tradesperson does four things: it tells Google you exist and where you work, it gives a customer somewhere to land before they call, it shows your reviews in a format that feels credible rather than an algorithm-sorted Facebook page, and it lets you take enquiries at midnight without you lifting a finger. That covers the basics without any ongoing content work on your part.

The two channels reinforce each other

A customer who sees you recommended in a local Facebook group will often Google your name before they ring. If they find a clean website with a gallery and reviews, that's the conversion moment. If they find nothing, they move to the next recommendation. Having both means every touchpoint closes rather than leaks. This is exactly the pattern in our Facebook-page-to-booked-out case study: the page kept existing customers warm, but it was the site that caught the strangers searching Google.

What the switch actually looks like

The change is rarely dramatic on day one and then compounds. In that representative case, a Facebook-only sparky whose posts reached the same forty followers went from a dead January to a diary booked two to three weeks ahead within four months of a site going live. The numbers, rounded and representative rather than a single audited client, show the shape of it.

Representative of the typical pattern when a Facebook-only trade adds a proper site, rounded and anonymised, not a guarantee of exact figures.

Sitework builds and looks after hand-coded trade sites for a one-off £600 (£300 to start, £300 on launch), then £20 a month, done for you, with no agency markup and no per-lead fees. I'll show you a free mockup of your actual business before you pay a penny, and the site is usually live within a week. Hosting, domain, SSL and unlimited small changes are included in the £20. If you want the full cost-per-job comparison against a van wrap or paid ads, it's in website vs van signwriting vs local ads. Apply at sitework.uk/#apply.