A website, even with a good Facebook page?

It is the question we get asked most often, and it is perfectly fair. Your Facebook page has brought you customers. It is free. You know how to use it. So why pay $800 for a website?

Here is the honest answer, starting with what Facebook does well.

What Facebook does better than a website

Facebook is unbeatable at one thing: showing your work to people who were not looking for you. A photo of a nice, freshly poured concrete walkway, posted on a Thursday evening, can be seen by three hundred people in your area who had no intention of hiring anyone that week. A website will never do that.

Facebook is also excellent for everyday social proof: comments, shares, people tagging you. That is worth gold and it cannot be replaced.

So no, we will not tell you to stop using Facebook. We will tell you the opposite.

The problem is that you own nothing

Your Facebook page does not belong to you. It belongs to Meta. You forget that until the day you wake up with a page suspended for a reason an algorithm will never explain, with nobody to call. It happens more often than you think, and it always happens at the worst time.

There is also reach. A post today reaches a small fraction of your followers. You built your audience over six years; Meta decides every morning how many people see it.

A website, on the other hand, is yours. The domain is in your name. The files are yours. Nobody can decide on a Tuesday morning to make it invisible.

The two moments that never happen on Facebook

First moment: someone has a problem right now. Their driveway is blocked, their basement is flooded, their furnace quit. That person does not go on Facebook. They open Google and type three words. If you are not there, they will never know you exist.

Second moment: someone has already heard your name. A friend gave them your name. They look you up to check that you are a real business. They find a Facebook page whose last post dates from March 2023. They will not write to ask whether you are still in business: they will simply call someone else.

What a website does that Facebook will not

• It answers while you sleep. Your services, the areas you serve, your prices, the way you work: it is all there, at three in the morning, while you sleep.
• It makes you credible in eight seconds. That is how long it takes someone to decide whether a business looks serious. A clean website does that job on its own.
• It feeds your Google profile. Google wants to see a website connected to your business profile. Without a site, your profile is missing part of what makes it stand out.
• It sorts your calls. A well-built form sends you the type of work, the town and the budget before you even pick up. Fewer lost calls, more real customers.

Your territory stops following your circle

On Facebook, you mostly reach people who already know you, or friends of friends. That is a circle. It is solid, but it has a border, and that border moves slowly.

A website does not ask anyone to be your friend. Someone forty minutes from you types what they need and the name of their town into Google, and you show up, even if they have never heard of you and have no contacts in common with you. That is how you land the job a little farther away, the neighbouring town, the commercial contract that would never have come through your news feed.

And it works while you are on a job site. You do not have to post to exist.

And all of this happens on a phone

Your next customer is not sitting at a computer. They are in their driveway, in their car, or standing in their basement in two inches of water. They search on their phone, and they decide in a few seconds.

That is why we build for the small screen first: a number you tap to call, text you can read without zooming, pages that load on an ordinary connection at the end of a country road. A website that “also works on mobile” and a website designed for mobile are not the same thing. And it is the second one that makes your phone ring.

What it costs, versus what it replaces

That is the real objection behind the question. A website is an amount of money.

Except you have to compare it to the right thing. An ad in the local paper, a sponsorship, a batch of flyers: each time, the money goes and does not come back. The next month, you have to start again if you want to be seen. A website is an amount paid once, with the first year of hosting included at ganolyk, then care that costs less per month than filling up a truck. And it works every day, all night, without being reprinted.

Spread over three or four years, the normal lifespan of a well-built website, it is often the cheapest marketing line you have. And it is the only one that still belongs to you at the end.

It is not just our opinion

We have an interest in telling you all this, and we know it. So here is someone who has none: the Business Development Bank of Canada, the bank for Canadian entrepreneurs, gives small businesses essentially the same reasons: your customers are already online, a website opens new markets, it is an affordable form of marketing, it strengthens your brand image, and it makes you visible to people searching on their phones.

They have no website to sell you. We do. Both still reach the same conclusion.

The real answer

It is not “Facebook or a website”. They are two tools doing two different jobs. Facebook makes your work known. Your website converts the people who are already looking for you, and those are your best customers, because they have already half made up their minds.

The best setup is simple: an active Facebook page to show your jobs, an up-to-date Google profile to be found, and a website that connects the two and that, for its part, belongs to you for good.

That is exactly what our GPS Formula does: it aligns your Google profile and your Facebook page with your website, so all three tell the same story.