New Zealand · September 2026
Short answer: for a lot of trades it is genuinely enough to start, and we would rather say so than sell you something. But there are four specific things it cannot do, and one of them is the reason most people eventually change their mind.
Credit where it is due. A Facebook page is free, it takes ten minutes, and for a trade business it does three real jobs properly:
If you have a Facebook page that you actually post on, you are ahead of plenty of businesses that paid for a website and then let it sit there for four years.
Your page will usually turn up if somebody searches your business name. That is a person who already knows about you. The searches that bring new work look like “electrician” plus a town name, and those are won by the Google map results and by ordinary websites. A Facebook page competes badly in both.
Facebook sells the attention on your page. Somebody looks at your work, scrolls, and gets shown an advert for another trade. You are paying for that with your own content and there is no setting to turn it off.
Plenty of people do not have an account, or are logged out, or hit a sign-up prompt part way down. Older customers in particular. You do not find out about the ones who gave up.
The page is not yours. It sits on somebody else's platform under rules you did not agree to and cannot negotiate. Accounts do get suspended, occasionally by mistake, and when it happens you lose the photographs, the reviews and the messages together, usually with nobody to ring about it.
The question worth sitting with: if your Facebook page vanished tomorrow morning, what would be left? For a lot of trades the honest answer is a phone number in somebody's contacts and nothing else.
Not what a web designer usually tells you. In order:
That order matters. A website added on top of a claimed Google listing works. A website instead of a claimed Google listing mostly does not.
Not much, honestly. For most trades one page does the job: who you are, what you do, the towns you cover, your hours, photographs of real work, and a phone number that is one tap to ring. That is it. Booking systems and blogs are usually somebody else's idea of what you need.
What matters is that the domain name is registered in your business name, so it stays yours whatever happens with whoever built it.
If you want to know what that should cost before anybody quotes you, we published real prices from New Zealand trade web designers, including our competitors’, so you can see the going rate.
Built for your trade
For being findable by name, a Facebook page helps and is worth having. It is not enough on its own. It rarely ranks for what you actually do in your town, it shows your competitors' adverts beside your work, you do not control it, and a lot of people cannot see much of it without an account.
Usually for your business name, yes. For searches like plumber plus your town, almost never. Those searches are won by the Google map results and by ordinary websites, and a Facebook page competes badly in both.
You lose it, including the reviews and the photographs, and there is often no person to appeal to. It is rare but it does happen, and it is the strongest practical argument for owning something yourself under your own domain name.
No. Keep it. It is genuinely useful for showing recent jobs and for people who already know you. The point is that it should not be the only place your business exists.
Related, if it is useful: how to claim your Google Business Profile, why your business does not show up on Google and do I need a website for my business?
Send us your business name and the town. We will tell you honestly whether we can build one, and if we can, we email you the link to look at. It costs nothing to have and nothing to keep, as long as you answer one message a year saying the details are still right.