Plenty of good Canberra businesses run on a Facebook page and nothing else. Some of them are doing fine. So before anyone tries to scare you into a website, let's give Facebook its due, then look at where it quietly leaks money, and finish with a checklist you can answer in five minutes.
What Facebook genuinely does well
Credit where it is due:
- It is free and fast. You can have a page live in an hour with photos, hours and a phone number.
- It is where your community already is. Canberra's suburb groups and buy-sell-swap pages are real referral engines. "Can anyone recommend a plumber in Kambah?" gets answered in minutes, and being taggable in that thread is worth something.
- It shows you are alive. Recent posts and recent reviews tell people the business still exists, which is more than some websites manage.
- Messenger works. For a chunk of your customers, sending a DM is easier than a phone call.
If your work is 100% referrals and repeat customers, and you are at capacity, a well-kept Facebook page might honestly be enough. That is a real category of business and there is no shame in it.
Where Facebook quietly fails you
The problems start the moment you want customers who do not already know you.
1. You lose the Google search
When someone in Canberra needs what you do, they do not scroll Facebook. They Google it. "Physio Gungahlin." "Emergency electrician Belconnen." Facebook pages rank poorly in Google, sit behind login walls for some visitors, and give searchers a cluttered feed instead of an answer. The businesses on page one of that search have websites. That search happens every day, whether you are in it or not.
2. The algorithm decides who sees you
Organic reach for business pages has been shrinking for a decade. Post to your 800 followers and Facebook might show it to 40 of them, then offer to "boost" it for money. Your page does not really reach your audience. It reaches whoever the algorithm picks, and the dial is set by a company whose income depends on you paying for the rest.
3. It is rented land
This is the argument people make badly, so here it is fairly. Nobody thinks Facebook is shutting down tomorrow. The rented-land problem is smaller and more likely than that: pages get restricted by mistake, hacked accounts take weeks to recover through a support system with no phone number, and features change under you without warning. Ask anyone who has been locked out of a business Manager account how much leverage they had. On your own website, nothing changes unless you change it. That difference matters exactly once, on a bad day, and on that day it matters completely.
4. The 9pm problem
Most enquiries to local businesses happen outside business hours, because that is when your customers finally sit down. On Facebook at 9pm, a potential customer scrolls your feed looking for prices you have not posted, sends a Messenger enquiry, and gets your auto-reply. Then they keep searching, and the competitor whose website listed prices and took a booking on the spot wins the job. A good website answers the 9pm question at 9pm. Ours go a step further with an AI front desk that responds to enquiries around the clock, trained on your actual services and prices.
5. Credibility, especially at higher prices
For a $30 purchase, a Facebook page is fine. For a $3,000 job or a first physio appointment, people check you out properly, and "no website" reads as "not established" whether that is fair or not. Government and commercial clients around Canberra will rarely engage a supplier they cannot find outside social media. Your website is where a fence-sitter goes to decide you are real.
The honest decision checklist
Answer these yes or no:
- Do you want more customers than word of mouth currently brings?
- Do people search Google for what you do? (Search your own trade plus your suburb tonight and see who shows up.)
- Is your average job or sale worth more than about $100?
- Have you ever missed an enquiry because it arrived after hours?
- Do you quote against competitors who have proper websites?
- Would losing access to your Facebook page for a month hurt your income?
Zero or one yes: Facebook is probably enough for now. Keep the page current, chase reviews, and revisit this in a year. Genuinely.
Two or three: you are leaving money on the table, but not urgently. A single well-built landing page, which is the cheapest thing we make, would capture the Google searches you are currently invisible for. See what that costs here, including our actual prices.
Four or more: every month without a website is costing you jobs you never knew about, because the customer who could not find you never rang to say so.
Not either-or
The right setup for most Canberra small businesses is both, doing different jobs. The website is home base: it ranks on Google, holds your prices and proof, takes the 9pm enquiry, and belongs to you outright. Facebook is the megaphone: community presence, tagging in recommendation threads, and posts that link back to your site where the enquiry actually converts. Facebook brings the crowd. The website closes the sale.
What you should not do is pay real money for a website that is just a brochure nobody visits. If it does not rank, load fast and convert, you have bought a very expensive business card. That is a build-quality problem, not a website problem, and it is why how we build matters as much as whether you build.
Find out what you are missing, free
Here is a low-risk way to settle the question. Tell us about your business and within 48 hours we will design a real homepage concept for it, free, no obligation. You will see exactly what "your business with a proper website" looks like before spending a cent. If the answer is still "Facebook's enough for now", you have lost nothing but gained a very clear picture.