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The honest answer first
If you're a one person operation, your customers find you by word of mouth, and you aren't trying to grow, a Facebook page is enough for now. I'll say that out loud even though I build websites for a living, because sending someone a bill for something they don't need yet is a bad way to earn a reputation in a city this size.
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What changes the answer is one thing: whether you need to be found by people who have never heard of you. Not how big you are, not how long you've been trading. If your next customer already knows your name, a page will do. If your next customer is a stranger typing "furnace repair Kingston" into a search box, you need something a search engine can find, and a Facebook page is a poor fit for that job.
What a Facebook-only presence costs you
Think of a social page as a stall at the public market behind City Hall. The market brings the crowd, the table is cheap, and you can be open by Saturday. What you don't get is a door of your own. The market decides the hours, the layout, which stalls are near the entrance, and whether the whole thing moves across town next spring.
That's the real cost, and it shows up in three practical ways.
You don't decide who sees your posts. Meta's own explanation of how Feed ranking works says it weighs thousands of signals to predict what each person will find interesting, and that the ranking is personalized for every reader. Following you does not mean seeing you. Meta also says plainly that the system it describes might change over time, so a post that did well last year is no promise about this year, and you won't be told what changed.
You don't build any search presence of your own. Google describes Search as crawling pages, indexing them, and serving the ones it judges relevant to what was typed. A Facebook page is one page, at Meta's web address, in Meta's layout. Your "furnace repair" service, your "duct cleaning" service and your "Amherstview" service area don't exist as separate pages anywhere, so there is nothing for Google to index and rank for those searches. Every post you write makes facebook.com a little stronger and your business no easier to find.
And you're stuck inside the template. Booking, quoting, a real price list, a gallery organized the way your work is actually organized, a page for each service so each one can be found on its own. None of that fits in a profile designed for everybody from a bakery to a band.
| The cost | On a Facebook page | On your own website |
|---|---|---|
| Who sees your posts | Meta's ranking system, personalized per reader, and Meta says it can change | Anyone who opens the page sees the whole page |
| Being found in Google | One page on facebook.com, with no separate pages for your services or towns | A page for each service and each town, so each one can be found on its own |
| Layout and features | The same profile as a bakery or a band | Booking, quoting, a price list, a gallery, whatever your trade needs |
| Who owns it | Meta, on Meta's terms | You, for as long as you pay the domain and hosting bill |
Following you does not mean seeing you.
When a Facebook page is genuinely fine
There are real cases where I would tell you to stay put.
- A seasonal business with a full customer list and no interest in more.
- A shop whose entire trade walks past the window.
- A side business you're still testing, where the point is finding out whether anyone wants it before you spend money proving you're serious about it.
There's also the in-between. A Google Business Profile, which Google says you can set up and manage at no charge, plus a tidy social page, will carry a very small local business further than either one alone. It puts your hours, phone number and location on Google Maps and Search, and a website link is one of the things you can add to it later rather than something it needs first. If you aren't ready for a site, that's where I would put your next hour. How to set one up and keep it healthy is a job for the Kingston SEO side of things; this guide is about the build decision.
Two Kingston owners, two different answers
A bakery on Princess Street and a plumber running out of a truck in Amherstview are asking the same question and should get different answers.
The bakery's customers walk past the window. People find it by being downtown, by the smell, and by someone at work saying "the place near the market." A Facebook page with the hours, a photo of what came out of the oven this morning, and a Google Business Profile with the same hours covers what a walk-in shop needs. The website earns its money later, when the bakery starts taking wedding cake orders or catering, because those customers plan ahead and search first.
The plumber has no window. Nobody walks past a truck. Every new customer is somebody with water on the floor at 9pm who has never heard of him, and that person is in a search engine, not scrolling a feed. He needs a page for emergency plumbing, a page for water heaters, and a page that says Amherstview, Kingston and Napanee in plain words, because that is what gets typed. For him the Facebook page is a place to post finished jobs, and the website is where the phone calls come from.
Same city, same question, opposite advice. The difference is whether the next customer already knows your name.
A web address, a set of pages and a customer list that belong to you. Those are the three things a platform cannot take back, change the terms on, or hide from the people looking for you.
The tipping point
You'll feel it before you can name it. Here is the checklist I would run through.
- You've typed your prices into Messenger more than once this week.
- A customer told you they couldn't find you, and it turned out they had searched Google while you were only living in a feed.
- You want to be found for the thing you do, not just the name people already know.
- A post that used to get a response now gets nothing, and you cannot say what changed.
- You've started a second service, or a second town, and there's nowhere on the page to give it its own space.
- You're spending money on ads to reach the people who already follow you.
Tick two of those and a website stops being a nice-to-have. It becomes the only piece of your marketing you actually own.
Common questions
Can a Facebook page show up in Google at all?
It can. A Facebook Page is created as a public page, and Google says it crawls and indexes the pages it can reach and serves the ones it judges relevant. What you get is one result for your business name, on facebook.com. What you don't get is a separate result for each service and each town, because those pages don't exist.
If I build a website, should I delete the Facebook page?
No. Keep both and give each one a job. The page is for the people who already know you: today's photos, a closure notice, a quick reply. The website is for the stranger who searched, and the page should link to it so the two send people to each other.
How do I test the answer for my own business without spending anything?
Ask your next ten new customers how they found you and write it down. If three or more say they searched, you have already outgrown the page. If they all say a friend, a sign, or Facebook, another year on the page costs you very little. That ten-customer test is my own rule of thumb, not a Google number.
Checked against Meta and Google help pages on 2026-09-21: Meta, How Facebook ranks content in Feed, Meta, Create a Facebook Page, Google, Get started with Business Profile, Google, How Search works. The plumber and the bakery are illustrations, not clients.
Related guides
- What does a website actually cost in Kingston?
- What pages does a small Kingston business site actually need?
Building for another town? Kingston, Amherstview, Gananoque and Napanee each have a page of their own.
Tell me about your business and where your customers come from right now, and I'll tell you honestly whether a site would earn its money yet. If the answer isn't yet, I'll say that, and I'll tell you what to do instead. If cost is what is holding you back, what a website costs in Kingston lays the numbers out plainly, and when you're ready to build, the launch checklist is what I check on the day.