The SiteRoot team7 min read
A lot of Australian small businesses run their entire public presence off a Facebook page. Not as a half measure. As the whole thing: the photos, the enquiries, the recommendations, the hours, the phone number. It works, people find you, jobs come in.
So the honest answer to "should I move off Facebook" is that you should not move off it at all. You should put something underneath it that belongs to you, and keep posting exactly as you do now. The page becomes the thing that gets attention. The website becomes the thing that holds the facts and takes the enquiry when the page is not where someone is looking.
What follows is what the page is genuinely good at, what you do not own, and then the actual list of what to take across and in what order.
What a Facebook page does better than your website will
This part gets skipped in most articles about this, usually by people selling websites. It should not be.
A page is free, it took you twenty minutes, and it is already where a chunk of your customers spend their evenings. You can post a photo of a finished job from the ute in thirty seconds and people who already like you will see it, which is a real advantage no website has. Messenger means someone can ask a question with one thumb without composing an email. The recommendations feature carries genuine weight with people who trust their own network more than a review site. And local buy-swap-sell and community groups are, for some trades, the single best source of work in the suburb.
None of that is replaced by a website. Keep the page, keep posting.
What you do not own, which is the actual problem
The trouble with a Facebook page is not that it is bad. It is that all of it sits on somebody else's platform, under rules you did not agree to and cannot read.
- The account can go. Disabled by mistake, hacked, or caught by an automated rule for something you did not know was a rule. It happens to real businesses, the appeal process is a form and a wait, and if it does not come back, the photos, the recommendations and the followers go with it in one afternoon. There is no phone number to ring.
- Logged-out visitors hit a wall. Someone who does not use Facebook, or is not logged in on that device, often gets a login prompt instead of your page. That is exactly the moment they have no patience for one.
- You do not control what sits around your work. Including, regularly, an ad for a competitor.
- A feed is not an answer. Your service area, your hours and your prices are in a post from March. Nobody scrolls to March. A visitor with a specific question will not find the answer, and they will not ask, they will go.
- People who are not on Facebook cannot find you at all. That includes anyone searching on a phone at 9pm, and increasingly, anyone who asks an AI assistant for a local tradesperson instead of typing a search.
- Your followers are a number you rent. You cannot email them. You cannot take them anywhere. How many of them see a post is decided by someone else and changes without notice.
The summary is simple: a page is a great place to be seen and a bad place to be the only copy.
What to take with you, in order
- The facts. Business name exactly as you trade, phone number, email, ABN, the suburbs you cover, hours, licence numbers, whether you are insured. This is half an hour and it is the most valuable half hour in the whole job, because these are the things customers actually check.
- The photos. Go through the page and pick the twenty best job photos. Facebook has a download-your-information tool in settings that packages up your photos and posts, which saves you saving them one at a time. Twenty good ones beat two hundred. Look for finished work, daylight, and nothing identifying a customer's address.
- The words you already wrote. Two sources here and the second is the good one. Your About text, which is usually fine. And the replies you find yourself typing into Messenger over and over: what a call-out costs, whether you come to that suburb, how long a job takes, whether you do quotes on Saturdays. Those repeated answers are your service pages, already written, in your own voice.
- The recommendations, carefully. Do not copy people's recommendations onto your website as testimonials. They were written for a different context, you do not have permission, and an edited version of someone's words presented as a review on your own site is a problem you do not need. Do the clean version instead: pick three customers whose words you loved, message them, and ask if you can quote them on your website. Most say yes, and then it is genuinely yours.
- The enquiries. Decide where a job request should land now. A form on the website that emails your actual inbox means a 2am enquiry is sitting with the rest of your morning instead of buried in a message request folder you check on Thursdays.
Wiring the two together
Do not treat this as a migration and announce it. Just connect them, both ways, in one afternoon.
On the Facebook page: put the address in the website field, in the page bio, and in a pinned post. If you use the action button, point it at your contact page or set it to call you.
On every post from now on: carry on exactly as you were, and add one line at the end. Full details on the website, then the address. That is it.
On the website: link to the Facebook page, clearly. It is genuine proof of an active business and people do check it.
Everywhere else: the van, the invoices, the quotes, the email signature, the voicemail greeting, any trade directory you already pay for. Most early website visitors are people who already heard your name.
The week after
Two things usually happen and both are fine.
The first is that enquiries arrive in two places for a while. Answer both, with the same speed and the same tone. Over a few months more of them drift to the website, because that is where the answers are.
The second is that you notice which questions you no longer get asked, because the website answered them. That is the whole point. Every question a page answers before someone calls is a call that starts further along.
What it costs to run both
Facebook stays free. The website is the new cost, and you should know it before you start: SiteRoot is A$16.50 a month including GST (A$15 plus GST), hosting included, no setup fee. 14 days free, then A$16.50/month (A$15 + GST). Card asked for during your 14 days, one free trial per customer, cancel anytime.
The domain is separate and you buy it yourself from a registrar, for roughly A$10 to A$30 a year, in your own name. That last part matters more here than anywhere: the entire reason for this exercise is owning your own presence, and it would be an odd result to leave that one piece in someone else's account.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
Building the site is free and takes about fifteen minutes, because it is built from questions about your business rather than from a blank page. Which means you can have the thing in front of you, with your suburbs and your services and your phone number on it, before you decide whether you want it at all.
What you get is the part a page cannot do: your phone number as a tap-to-call link, an enquiry form that emails your own inbox, your business details published in a form both search engines and AI assistants can read directly rather than guess at, and something that stays up whether or not an account somewhere is having a good week.
Keep posting. Just stop being the only copy.
