“I don’t really need a website. I get all my work from Facebook and referrals.” We hear some version of that every month from roofers, groomers, pool guys and handymen around Sherman and Denison. So here’s our honest take on the Facebook page vs website question for a service business: you probably want both, but only one of them works for you when a stranger goes looking.
And if the phone is ringing, why change anything? Because you can’t see the calls you never got.
Facebook page vs website: what each one does for a service business
Facebook is good at keeping you in front of people who already know you. Past customers, neighbors, the friend from church who shares your posts. Photos of a finished job, a quick note that you’ve got an opening Thursday. For that, it’s fine, and it’s free.
It’s weak at the moment that matters most, when someone who has never heard of you needs the service you sell. Type “pest control Sherman TX” into Google and look at what comes back. You’ll see the map results, which come from Google Business Profiles, and then websites. A Facebook page turns up now and then, usually well down the page.
You also don’t own the page. Meta decides who sees your posts, what the page looks like and which features exist next year. Most owners who post regularly have watched their reach shrink without changing a thing. And if the account gets hacked or locked, there’s nobody local to call.
Then there’s the practical stuff a page just can’t do well: a separate page for each service, a list of the towns you cover, a quote form that lands in your inbox, answers to the questions customers ask before they call. A website does all of that, and it’s yours.
Where new customers look first
This matters more in Grayson County right now than it did a few years ago. Texas Instruments started production at its first new chip fab in Sherman in December 2025, and people keep moving here for those jobs and the ones around them. New residents don’t have a neighbor to ask yet. They don’t follow any local businesses on Facebook.
So they search. They look at the map results, check the star ratings, and tap through to the website of whoever looks legit. If there’s no website at the end of that chain, a lot of them just pick the next listing.
More of them are also asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 45% of consumers had used AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier. Those tools build their answers from websites, business listings and reviews. Much of Facebook sits behind a login, which makes a page a thin thing to be recommended from. If you want to show up in those answers, a site with clear service pages is the starting point for AI search optimization.
What a service business website actually needs
Not much, honestly. You don’t need animations or thirty pages. A clean site with a handful of the right pages will beat most of the competition in a town this size.
Your services, spelled out
“Plumbing services” tells nobody anything. “Water heater replacement, drain cleaning, slab leak repair and repiping for homes in Sherman, Denison and Pottsboro” tells the customer and Google exactly what you do and where. If a service makes you real money, give it its own page.
Where you work
Name the towns and counties you cover, and not only in the footer. The first question every caller has is “Do you come out to me?” Answer it before they have to ask.
A phone number on every screen
Put the number at the top of every page, make it tappable on a phone, and add a short form for people who won’t call. Don’t make anyone hunt.
Proof
- Recent reviews, quoted with the customer’s first name and town
- Photos of your actual jobs and your actual trucks, not stock photos
- License numbers, insurance, years in business
- Who shows up at the door, with a photo if you’re comfortable with it
It has to work on a phone
Google now looks at the mobile version of your site when it decides where you rank; it finished that switch, called mobile-first indexing, in 2023. Most of your customers are on a phone too, standing in a flooded laundry room or looking at a dead AC unit. If the site is slow or you have to pinch and zoom, they’re gone.
That’s the whole list. It’s where we start on every service business website we build, and most of what comes later is just adding a page when a new service or town earns one.
“But I can’t afford a website”
Fair. Cash is tight for a lot of small outfits, especially in the first few years. It’s the reason we offer a Website Lease: $500 a month with nothing upfront, so you aren’t writing a big check to get started. For a lot of trades, one or two extra jobs a month covers it.
Whatever route you take, don’t let price be the reason you have nothing. If you want the full picture of what sites cost around here, we broke it down in how much a small business website costs in Texas.
Keep the Facebook page
None of this means you should delete it. Keep posting job photos and seasonal reminders there, and link those posts back to the matching page on your site. Put the website address in the page’s About section. Let Facebook do the job it’s good at, keeping people who know you from forgetting you, and let the website catch the people who don’t know you yet.
One more thing: websites get stronger with age. Google trusts a site more once it has been around a while, collected some links and been kept up to date. The contractor down the road who launched two years ago has a head start that you can close, but only once you start.