Sometimes no
A sole trader with a full book from word of mouth, a Facebook page with job photos, a Google Business Profile with good reviews and a phone that rings enough does not need a website this year. Plenty of excellent tradespeople run that way for decades. Anyone who tells you every business needs a website is selling websites.
The question is whether your business is that one, and what changes when it is not.
What Facebook and Google Business Profile do well
Google Business Profile puts you on the map for "[trade] near me" and "[trade] [your town]" searches within a radius of your address, with your reviews, hours, photos and a call button. For local discovery near your base, it is the most important listing you have, and it is free.
Facebook lets existing customers find and recommend you, shows your recent jobs, and lets people message. Local community groups are where a lot of trade recommendations happen.
Between them: found near home, recommended by neighbours, reviews visible, a way to call. For many sole traders, that is the whole marketing plan and it works.
What they do badly
The towns beyond your radius. Google Business Profile ranks you near your address. Search "electrician [town twenty minutes away]" and you are not there. A website with a page per town you serve is the only legitimate way to appear in those searches.
Specific services. "EV charger installation [town]", "heat pump installer", "bathroom renovation" are searches for a service, and Google shows pages about that service. A profile lists services; it does not rank a page for each.
Photo quotes. Facebook Messenger can take photos, but it is one inbox among your personal messages, unstructured, and you cannot count what it produced. A quote form on a website lands in your job software with the photos, and you can see how many came and from where.
Proof in one place. Registration numbers linked to registers, insurance, guarantees, the process, all findable in a minute. A profile has a description box.
Ownership. Facebook can change what pages can do, restrict reach, or suspend an account, and the audience you built is theirs. Google can change the profile rules. A website on your domain is the one place you control.
Anything you want to send people to. A quote link, a booking link, an "areas we cover" list, a price guide. Profiles can carry a link; the link has to go somewhere.
The signs you have crossed the line
- You want more work than referrals bring, or different work (higher value, a new service).
- You cover several towns and want work in the ones you are not based in.
- You have taken on someone, or want to, and need the pipeline to justify it.
- Quotes arrive as evening phone calls you miss, or as photos buried in Messenger.
- You are spending on ads or a lead-gen service and the landing page is not yours.
- A competitor with a website is showing up for searches you should be winning.
Two or more of those, and a website is a tool that pays for itself in a few jobs.
What the website is, for a trade
Not a brochure. A machine for turning searches in the towns you serve into calls and photo quotes: tap-to-call on every screen, a photo quote form to your phone, a page per service and per town, your credentials linked to the registers, your real jobs and faces, your reviews beside the buttons, fast on a phone with one bar, tracked so you know which town the jobs came from. Mid four figures once, hosting in the tens per month, in your name.
Facebook and Google Business Profile stay. The website is where they point, and it is what appears for the searches they cannot reach.
A middle step
If you are near the line and the budget is tight: a one-page site on your own domain with your name, towns covered, services listed, credentials with numbers, a call button, a photo quote form, and your Google reviews. It gives your profile and your Facebook page a place to link to, ranks for your name and your base town, and takes photo quotes. It is not the full grid of service and area pages, and it is more than a profile.
Where this sits
We tell some tradespeople who ask that they do not need a website yet. The rest get a trade website built to the description above at a fixed price, with the Facebook page and the Google profile wired to it, because the profile finds you near home and the website finds you everywhere else you work.