Is a Facebook page enough for a tradie business?

For a tradie starting out with no budget, a Facebook page plus a Google Business Profile is a reasonable minimum. But a Facebook page cannot rank in Google search results the way a website can, shows competitors' ads alongside your work, and belongs to Meta rather than to you. Most established tradies end up needing both, with the website as the thing they own.

Can a Facebook page rank on Google?

A Facebook page can appear in Google results for your business name, but it will rarely rank for the searches that actually generate work, such as 'electrician' plus a suburb. Those results are dominated by websites and Google Business Profiles. If you want to be found by people who do not already know your name, a Facebook page is the wrong tool.

What happens to my Facebook page if the account is disabled?

You lose it, along with your photos, reviews and message history, and there is generally no meaningful appeal process. Business pages are tied to a personal account, so a problem with that personal account can remove your business presence overnight. This is the strongest practical argument for owning a website as well.

Facebook Page vs Website for Tradies — Which You Need

Short answer: they're not competitors, they're different tools. Facebook is where people who already know you keep up with you. A website is how people who don't know you find you. If you can only have one thing, make it a Google Business Profile — but the thing you should own is a website.

What each one is actually for

	Facebook page	Website
Who sees it	People who already follow you, plus friends of people who engage	People actively searching for your trade in your area
Google search	Rarely ranks for anything but your business name	Can rank for "[trade] [suburb]" — the searches that produce work
Who owns it	Meta. You're a tenant	You, outright
Competitors' ads	Shown alongside your posts	None
Cost	Free	One-off build, then hosting
Setup time	An afternoon	Days to weeks
If it disappears	Photos, reviews and messages gone, little recourse	You hold the files and the domain

What Facebook genuinely does better

We're not going to pretend it's useless — plenty of New Zealand tradies get real work from it:

It's free and it's now. A page today beats a website in three weeks if you need something this afternoon.
Local groups convert. Community buy/sell/recommend groups are genuinely strong for trades, and that's Facebook's turf.
Posting is frictionless. Photo of a finished job from the ute, thirty seconds, done.
It keeps you in mind. Someone who followed you two years ago sees a post and remembers they need a quote.

None of that is nothing. If you're posting regularly and getting work, keep doing it.

Where it falls down for a trade business

You can't be found by strangers

The searches that bring in work — "plumber Papakura", "electrician near me" — are answered by Google with map results and websites. A Facebook page barely features. Everyone finding you on Facebook already knew you existed, which limits it to keeping the network you have rather than growing one.

Your competitors advertise on your page

Facebook's business model puts ads next to content. Someone looking at your kitchen renovation photos can be shown a competitor's ad in the same scroll. You're paying for that placement with your content.

You don't own any of it

This is the one that actually bites. A business page is tied to a personal account. If that account gets disabled — hacked, flagged by an automated system, caught in a policy sweep — the business page goes with it. Photos, reviews, message history, gone, and the appeal process is largely automated.

Ask around and you'll find a tradie this has happened to. Rebuilding from nothing is a brutal way to learn the difference between renting and owning.

It's the wrong shape for what customers want to know

A customer deciding on a $15,000 renovation wants your service area, your process, your credentials, examples of similar work, and a way to get in touch. A reverse-chronological feed is a bad way to deliver any of that. They'll scroll two screens and give up.

What we'd actually recommend, in order

Google Business Profile. Free, and the biggest single lever in local search for a tradie. If you do nothing else, do this.
Reviews on that profile. Also free. Ask every happy customer. This is the highest-return unpaid work available to you.
A website you own. Somewhere to send people, somewhere to rank, and the thing that survives a platform changing its mind.
Facebook, if you'll actually post. Good when maintained. A page abandoned since 2023 is worse than no page — it signals a business that may have folded.

Note that two of those four are free and come first. Anyone selling you a website before you've claimed your Google profile has the order wrong.

The best answer is both, connected

They work better together than either does alone. Post the job photo on Facebook, link to the relevant page on your site. Your Google profile links to your site. Your site links to your Facebook so people can follow along.

Search engines also use consistency across those profiles to confirm you're a real, established business — same name, same phone number, same address everywhere. That consistency is worth more than most tradies realise, and costs nothing but care.

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