Do Contractors Need a Website If They Have a Facebook Page?

A plumber I talked to had 2,300 followers on his Facebook page, a steady drip of job photos, and no website. "Everyone's on Facebook," he said. "Why would I pay for a site nobody visits?" It's a fair question — and the usual answer, because you need one, is useless without saying what for. So here's the honest version, trade-offs and all.

Yes — if you want work from people who don't already know you, you need a website, even with a busy Facebook page. But not because Facebook is worthless. The two do genuinely different jobs, and the mistake isn't using Facebook — it's expecting it to be the whole thing.

Fast answer. Keep the Facebook page — for trades it's one of the biggest lead sources there is, and it's your proof wall. But you also need a website: it's the only presence you own, the only one that ranks for "[trade] near me," and the one nearly 40% of people expect before they'll trust you. Both — for different jobs.

I build websites for a living, so weigh this accordingly. But I've deliberately written the case for Facebook first, because it's real — and because a piece that pretends Facebook doesn't work for contractors would be lying to you.

Where a Facebook Page Genuinely Wins

Start here, because most "you need a website" articles skip it and lose your trust in the first paragraph. Facebook does real work for a contractor, and some of it a small website does worse.

It's one of the biggest lead sources trades have. In Jobber's 2026 survey of more than a thousand home-service businesses, Facebook was the single largest digital lead source — 32% named it, ahead of Google Search at 20%. That's not a typo, and it's not nothing: for a lot of trades, the page pulls its weight.

It's where word-of-mouth happens now. When someone posts "looking for a good plumber in [town], who do you recommend?" in a local group and neighbours tag you, that's the referral your business runs on — reproduced publicly, at scale, in front of people who trust the person tagging you. Facebook is the second most-used tool people reach for to find a local business, behind only Google.

The homeowners who buy renovations are still there. This is the part the "Facebook is dead" crowd gets wrong. Facebook is the most-used platform among Gen X and Boomers in Canada — the 45-to-65 homeowners who spend on roofs, kitchens and furnaces — and about two-thirds of Canadians use it weekly (Environics, 2025). Younger users have drifted to other apps, but your renovation buyer hasn't.

It's free, instant, and visual. Posting a finished job from your phone takes seconds and needs no web skills. For a trade whose product is visual — a re-shingled roof, a poured driveway, a tidy panel — that immediacy is a genuine strength, and reviews accumulate publicly as you go.

So keep the page. The problem isn't Facebook. The problem is what a page can't do, no matter how many followers it has.

Can a Facebook Page Rank on Google? (Yes — and It Still Loses)

Here's where most articles are out of date. For years the line was "Facebook can't rank on Google." As of July 2025, that's no longer strictly true — Meta now lets Google index public posts from professional Facebook and Instagram accounts (content since 2020, with an opt-out). But indexable and rankable for the searches that bring you jobs are two very different things.

You don't control what makes a page rank. A page that ranks for "eavestrough repair Grande Prairie" needs a title, a URL, structured data, and a body of text built around that search. On a website you control all of it. On Facebook you control none of it — you're posting into a template Meta owns, with no real service pages and no service-area pages for the towns you cover.

The good stuff is behind a login wall. Load a business page while logged out — the way a first-time customer or a search crawler sees it — and after a few posts you hit a "log in to continue" wall. Google can index the thin public surface; the reviews, photos and history that actually sell you sit behind the gate.

A Facebook page never enters the map pack. The three boxed local results at the top of a "[trade] near me" search — the map with the three businesses — are drawn only from Google Business Profiles, never from Facebook. That's the most valuable real estate in local search, and a Facebook page can't occupy it.

The AI answer engines can't read it at all. This is the newest gap and the one nobody's talking about. Facebook's own robots.txt — the file a site uses to instruct automated crawlers — blocks the major AI engines outright: ChatGPT's crawler, Perplexity's, Claude's, and Google's AI crawler are all told do not collect this. So when a homeowner asks an AI assistant "who's a good HVAC company near me?", a Facebook-only business simply isn't in the running. A public website is.

Meanwhile, most people still start on search, not social — social media is the main way only about 14% of people look for a local business (BrightLocal, 2025). If you're only on Facebook, you're absent from where the search begins.

What Breaks When Facebook Is Your Only Web Presence

Even setting search aside, a page-only business is built on land it rents. That's fine until the day it isn't — and the ways it breaks are outside your control.

You don't own the audience. Meta's own transparency material shows the feed now fills up to half its space with posts from accounts people don't follow, and a typical business-page post reaches under 2% of the page's own followers. Those 2,300 followers are not an audience you can reach at will; they're an audience Meta rents back to you, mostly through ads.

You don't own the reach, the tools, or the roadmap. Over 2024–2026, Meta forced every page through a "New Pages Experience" migration with no way back, retired the old publishing tools, and trimmed the analytics. None of that was your decision, and none of it is reversible. A website changes when you decide it changes.

Losing access can happen — and there's barely anyone to call. In March 2024, 41 U.S. state attorneys general wrote to Meta about the flood of people locked out of accounts with nowhere to turn; in New York alone, account-takeover complaints had risen more than tenfold. CBC has documented Canadian cases: a North Vancouver realtor wrongly banned for seven weeks — Meta later admitted the ban was a mistake — and a Montreal creative locked out with no human to reach. Meta's terms let it disable an account "in our discretion," and the only reliable human support is a paid subscription (Meta Verified, about $37 CAD a month). Your business presence shouldn't depend on a monthly fee to get customer service most companies give free.

Your page rides on a personal account. A Facebook business page has no independent login — it's administered through personal profiles. If the admin's personal account is hacked or suspended, the page can go with it. That's a business-critical asset hanging off a personal profile most owners don't guard like one.

None of this means Meta is out to delete your compliant business page — it isn't. The honest claim is narrower and still damning: when access is lost, by hack, error, or enforcement, a page-only business has little recourse and no reliable support. A website you own has none of that exposure.

What a Website Does That a Facebook Page Can't

This is the other half of the division of labour — the jobs only an owned site can do, and the reason "just use Facebook" leaves work on the table.

It ranks for the services and towns you work in. A real page per service — furnace repair, AC install, ductwork — and clarity on the service areas you cover is what surfaces you for "[trade] + [town]" searches. A Facebook page has no equivalent, and those searches are pure buyer intent.

It feeds your Google Business Profile. The map-pack listing you want is ranked partly on the strength of the website linked to it. No site, or a weak one, and your map-pack position suffers — so skipping the website quietly costs you the local visibility people assume Facebook or a bare profile provides. (More on that split in contractor not showing up on Google: maps vs. search.)

It carries the trust signals homeowners actually check. People vetting a contractor look for licensing, WCB coverage, insurance, written warranties, and real project galleries — in Houzz's 2024 data, references and licensing rank near the top of what buyers weigh. A website presents those in a form you control; a Facebook page can't structure them, and people trust a company's own Facebook content less than an independent website anyway.

It's the credibility check even referred customers run. A referral gets you named; it rarely ends the vetting. In DreamHost's 2026 survey, 58% of people said they check a business's website to confirm what they saw on social or a Google listing, and 39% have decided against a business specifically because it had no website — 45% among those under 44. In Canada, a CIRA survey found 30% simply don't trust a business with no website at all. The website is where "someone recommended you" turns into "I'll call them."

You own it. The domain, the content, the search ranking, the leads — all yours, all compounding over time. A Facebook page is space you rent on terms that change. If you're weighing what that owned asset costs, how much a contractor website should cost in Canada breaks it down; if you're wondering whether a builder is enough, is Wix good enough for a contractor website? covers that honestly.

How to Use a Website and Facebook Together

The takeaway isn't "quit Facebook." It's to stop asking one tool to do every job. Here's the division of labour that actually works for a trade.

Tip 1: Make the website the hub you own. Your services, your service areas, your licensing and warranties, your quote form, your project galleries — the searchable, ownable core. Everything else points back to it.

Tip 2: Claim the Google Business Profile and link it to the site. This is what puts you in the map pack, and it's free. The profile and the website reinforce each other; do both. See Google Business Profile vs. your website for how the two split the work.

Tip 3: Keep Facebook as the proof-and-reach layer. Post jobs as you finish them, stay active in local groups, let recommendations and reviews accumulate — then link back to the website for the details and the quote. Use it for what it's genuinely best at.

Tip 4: Don't let leads live only on rented land. Reviews, messages and followers that exist only inside Facebook vanish if the account does. Route enquiries to something you control, and treat the page as a channel into your business, not the business itself.

Sources: Jobber 2026 Home Service Report, BrightLocal Local Consumer Review & Search surveys, DreamHost 2026 Local Business Trust Index, CIRA Canada's Internet Factbook, CFIB small-business digital presence, Meta Transparency Center and Meta's July 2025 search-indexing announcement, the 2024 state attorneys general letter to Meta, CBC reporting on account lockouts, and Lightly Coded's own check of facebook.com/robots.txt. Figures in CAD where noted; current as of mid-2026. Survey figures are directional, not gospel — some are US data where Canadian equivalents don't exist, flagged where it matters.

Where to Start

If you're running on a Facebook page today, you don't need to tear anything down — you need to add the part you're missing. Start by finding out what a stranger actually finds when they search for your trade in your town: a free audit checks your live presence against what Google and the AI engines can see, and the human follow-up tells you whether the gap is a website, a Google Business Profile, or something you can fix without spending much at all.

When you're ready to build the owned side, Website Design & Development covers what that work involves, and Website & SEO for Canadian Contractors covers the contractor approach as a whole. And before you compare quotes, the contractor website checklist walks through the four jobs a site has to do — so you can tell whether what you're being sold will actually earn its keep.