The honest answer first
If you run a small business in New Zealand and all you've got right now is a Facebook page, I'm not going to tell you that's worthless. It isn't. A well-run Facebook page is free, it's quick to update from your phone, and it puts you in front of people who already follow you. For a brand-new side hustle or a market-stall business, it can genuinely be enough to start with.
But being enough to start with and being all you'll ever need are two very different things. The question worth asking isn't whether a Facebook page has value. It's whether relying on it alone is quietly costing you customers you'll never know you missed.
What a Facebook page is genuinely good at
Let me give Facebook its due, because plenty of website designers won't.
- It's free to set up and free to run.
- It's built for quick, casual updates: a photo of today's job, a change to your hours, a weekend special.
- It has messaging built in, so people can ask a question without picking up the phone.
- If someone already follows you, your posts can land in front of them for nothing.
- The social proof is right there: likes, comments, people tagging their mates.
If your business is brand new, social by nature, or runs entirely on word of mouth within a community, that might carry you for a while. I'd rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need yet.
Where a Facebook page quietly lets you down
Here's the part that matters, and it's the part that doesn't show up until after you've already lost the customer.
You don't own it. This is the big one. Your Facebook page sits on land you rent, not land you own. Facebook decides who sees your posts, and organic reach for business pages has been shrinking for years, so a lot of your own followers never see what you post unless you pay to boost it. Accounts get locked too, sometimes by mistake, and getting a real human at Meta to sort it out is famously hard. If your whole online presence lives there and the door shuts, you've got nothing to fall back on.
Most people still search Google, not Facebook. When someone needs a plumber in Whangaparāoa or a caterer in Orewa, they type it into Google. A Facebook page barely competes for those searches, because Google would rather send people to a proper website and a Google Business Profile than to a social feed. If you're not there, the competitor who is gets the call.
You can't control the first impression. Every Facebook page looks like every other Facebook page: same layout, same fonts, your logo squeezed into a little circle. You can't lay your services out the way you'd explain them, put your pricing where people can find it, or shape the page around what your business actually does. You get a template that a billion other pages also use.
It's harder to turn a visitor into an enquiry. A good website walks someone from working out what you do, to seeing the proof, to knowing how to book, in a straight line. A Facebook page scatters all of that across posts that scroll out of sight within a week. There's no proper services page, no clear enquiry form, no booking button set up around how you actually work.
Not everyone is on Facebook. Plenty of your potential customers aren't, or never check it. If you sell to other businesses, or to a younger crowd, or to anyone who simply doesn't scroll Facebook, a page-only presence makes you invisible to them.
It can read as less established. Fair or not, a business with only a Facebook page often looks smaller and newer than one with its own website and domain name. When someone is deciding whether to trust you with a big job, that impression quietly counts.
But I get all my work from Facebook already
I hear this a lot, and it's usually true, right up until it isn't. The work you can see coming from Facebook is real. What you can't see is everyone who searched Google, didn't find you, and quietly rang someone else instead. That missed business never lands in your inbox, so it's easy to believe it doesn't exist.
Here's the difference in a single line: a Facebook page mostly reaches the customers who already know you, while a website helps the ones who don't know you yet.
The answer is usually both, not either
This isn't really a contest between a website and a Facebook page. The businesses that do best use each for what it's good at.
- Your website is home base: the place you own, that ranks on Google, explains your services properly, and turns visitors into enquiries.
- Your Facebook page is a channel: great for staying in front of existing followers, sharing day-to-day updates, and pointing people back to your site.
Post the job photo on Facebook by all means. Just link it back to the service page on your own site, where someone can read what you offer and actually get in touch. One feeds the other.
When a Facebook page on its own is fine, for now
To keep this honest: if you're just testing an idea, running something as a hobby, or you're a social or community venture that isn't really chasing new customers from search, a Facebook page by itself is a perfectly sensible place to start. Don't let anyone guilt you into a big spend before you need it.
The moment to add a website is when you're serious about being found by people who don't already know you, and when losing a job because someone couldn't find you online would genuinely sting.
It doesn't have to be a big leap
The reason a lot of businesses stay Facebook-only is the fear that a website means thousands of dollars and months of waiting. It doesn't have to. A sharp, mobile-first starter site of a few pages, the sort that shows who you are, what you do, and how to reach you, can be live in a matter of days and grow into something bigger later without starting over.
If you've outgrown the Facebook-only stage and you're weighing it up, that's exactly the sort of thing worth a quick, no-obligation chat. I'll give you a straight answer on whether you're ready for a website or whether your page is honestly doing the job for now.
