Facebook vs a Website: What Tradies Actually Need

"Just use Facebook" is advice a lot of tradies have been given over the years. And it's not completely wrong. Facebook is free, most people have an account, and it's easy to post photos of completed jobs. For a lot of tradies, it was the path of least resistance.

But there are real problems with relying on it as your only online presence, and they're worth understanding.

You Don't Own Your Facebook Page

This is the most important one. A Facebook page isn't your asset. It belongs to Meta. They can reduce how many of your followers see your posts, change how the platform works, or shut your page down for reasons that might not make sense to you.

It's happened to real businesses. An account gets flagged, sometimes incorrectly. It goes under review. The business loses access to their main online presence overnight, often with no clear path to get it back.

Your website, your domain, your hosting. Nobody can take that away from you.

Google Can't Really Index Your Facebook Page

When someone searches for a plumber in their suburb on Google, they're more likely to find businesses with proper websites. Google can read your website, understand what you do, what areas you serve, and show your business to people searching for exactly that.

Facebook pages do show up in Google results occasionally, but they're rarely what gets someone to call you. They're not designed to be found by people who don't already know you exist.

A website built with local SEO in mind is how you get found by people who've never heard of you before.

Facebook Requires Constant Feeding

A website does its job whether you're posting or not. Once it's built and indexed by Google, it keeps answering customer questions and generating enquiries in the background.

A Facebook page goes quiet the moment you stop posting. And if a potential customer visits your page and sees the last post was from eight months ago, that's a bad first impression.

Most tradies don't have the time or inclination to post on social media consistently. A website doesn't ask anything of you once it's set up properly.

The Platform is Aging

Facebook's user base skews older every year. Younger homeowners and property managers are less likely to be on it and more likely to search Google. If your business is only findable on Facebook, you're invisible to a growing chunk of potential customers.

Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms come and go. Google search has been the dominant way people find local businesses for twenty years. Owning a website means you're on the platform that isn't going anywhere.

So Should Tradies Use Social Media at All?

Yes. But it should be one piece of the picture, not the whole thing.

A Facebook or Instagram page that posts occasional job photos and links back to your website is useful. It gives existing customers somewhere to follow you and share your work. It can generate some referral traffic to your website.

But it should always be supporting your website, not replacing it.

The goal is to own your corner of the internet, and you can only really own something that you control. That's your website.