The short answer: keep the Facebook page; don’t make it your only address. A page is rented space: the feed decides who sees your posts, the account can be locked without notice, and neither Google nor AI assistants can reliably read your hours, prices and services from it. InternetNZ’s 2025 research found nearly three-quarters of consumers call a business’s website the most important tool for engaging with it, far more than said social media, while consumers report using social media less. A one-page website now costs from $1 a day. Have both; let the website be home.
What Facebook genuinely does well
Honesty first, because plenty of “you need a website” articles pretend Facebook is worthless. It isn’t.
- It’s where your existing customers already are. A post about this week’s specials reaches the people who chose to follow you, for free.
- Community and groups. Local buy-sell-swap groups and “can anyone recommend a plumber” threads are real lead sources in NZ towns.
- Marketplace and Messenger. For some retail and second-hand trades, the sale happens there.
- It’s still a top-three discovery tool. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found AI had become the third most-used tool for local business recommendations, behind only Google and Facebook.
If you have a page, keep it. The argument is about what a page can’t do.
What a page can’t do
It can’t be found by the people who don’t know you. Search “electrician Gore” on Google and the results are websites and Google Business Profiles, not Facebook pages. Ask an AI assistant the same thing and it reads websites and profiles too; much of a Facebook page sits behind a login, so assistants mostly can’t read it at all.
It hides the three things a new customer wants. Hours, prices, and what exactly you do are buried under a feed of posts. On a website they’re the first screen.
You don’t control who sees it. The feed decides which followers see which post. You can pay to reach more of them; that’s the business model.
It can vanish. Pages get locked by automated systems, hacked, or lost with an ex-employee’s login. When that’s your only address, your business is offline until an appeal is answered.
The audience is thinning. InternetNZ’s 2025 research reports consumers reducing their use of online channels including social media, even as businesses lean on it more. InternetNZ’s Tim Johnson put it plainly: social is “not necessarily the right place to pitch business now.”
The research, in one table
| InternetNZ 2025 finding | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| 47% of NZ businesses have no website | Around half your local competitors are invisible to search and AI |
| Nearly three-quarters of consumers name a website the most important engagement tool, far more than social or email | Customers’ preference is the opposite of the “Facebook is enough” instinct |
| Consumers report reducing their use of social media | The rented audience is shrinking |
| 74% of businesses and 62% of consumers say a .nz address is more trustworthy than others | A .co.nz of your own is itself a trust signal |
The survey was run by Yabble for InternetNZ across 750 businesses and 500 consumers in mid-2025. Our guide on whether you need a website at all goes through it in more detail.
The sensible setup: page, profile, one-page site
Three things, each doing one job:
- A website you own, on a .co.nz registered in your name: what you do, where, hours, prices or how you quote, proof, and a tap-to-call number. One page is enough for most local businesses.
- A Google Business Profile, verified, with the same name, number and hours as the site. Google’s own local-ranking guidance is built around a complete, verified profile, and it’s free. Here’s the setup.
- The Facebook page, kept for news, specials and community, with the website link in the bio and in a pinned post.
The rule that ties them together: every detail matches everywhere. Mismatched hours and numbers cost enquiries and machine trust.
”But a website costs money and Facebook is free”
It did, and Facebook still is. The gap has closed to a dollar a day. Our LaunchPad plan is $1 a day, $365 + GST a year ($419.75 incl. GST), and includes the build (free during launch), a .co.nz domain in your name, hosting, SSL, Google + AI-search setup and five updates a year. If you’re one of the more than 400 NZ businesses we’ve already built a site for, you can see it right now before spending anything. That’s less than most boosted posts cost, and unlike the boost, it’s yours.