What a Facebook page is honestly good at

It is free, it took you ten minutes, people already have the app, posting is easy, messages come to your phone, and your regulars see your updates without looking for them. For a business whose customers are local and already know you, that is real value and I am not going to pretend it is not.

If you are a food truck, a market stall, or a shop whose whole trade is repeat regulars who follow you, a Facebook page plus a Google listing may genuinely be enough. Spend the money on something else.

The four things it cannot do

1. It barely shows up in a Google search

When somebody searches for what you do rather than for your name, Google is ranking pages it can read and trust. A Facebook page is thin, largely identical in structure to every other Facebook page, and sits on a domain that is not yours, so none of the credit accrues to you. Businesses with their own site come up. You do not.

This is the expensive one, because it is invisible. You never see the customer who searched for "plumber near Crown Point", found three competitors, and called one.

2. You do not own it

The page exists at Facebook's discretion, under rules that change without notice. Pages get restricted by an automated system, locked when the admin account has a problem, or lost entirely when the person who created it leaves. There is no appeal you can rely on and no copy you can move.

This is not hypothetical. 17 of the businesses in my audit are pointing at a web address on a platform that shut down, and Google's own free site builder took out every address it had ever issued when it closed.

3. A lot of customers cannot see it

Plenty of people do not have Facebook, or are signed out, or are on a work laptop that blocks it. Sometimes they get a login wall instead of your hours. Anyone who quietly left Facebook in the last five years cannot look you up at all.

4. It is not built to answer a question quickly

A customer wants three things: are you open, what do you charge, can I call you. On a Facebook page those are buried under the last eleven months of posts. On a single web page they are the page.

The question that actually decides it

What to do before you spend anything

1. Claim your free Google Business Profile. If you do one thing, this. It is free, it is the panel on the right of a Google search, and it puts you in Maps. There is a full guide here, and it does not involve hiring anyone.
2. Search your own trade plus your town from a phone, signed out. Look at who comes up. That is your actual competition for the customer who does not know your name.
3. Check what your Facebook page shows a stranger. Open it in a private window where you are not logged in. Some pages show a login wall.
4. Then decide. If the first two steps put you where you need to be, stop. A website you do not need is money badly spent, and I would rather tell you that than sell you one.

Keep the Facebook page either way

This is not a choice between them. The page is where you post, the site is where you get found. They do different jobs, and the site should link to the page so your regulars can follow you.