“Do I really need a website? My Instagram page gets enquiries.” It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that Instagram and a website do different jobs. The mistake is not choosing one over the other. It is expecting one to do the other’s job.
What Instagram is good at
- Being seen by people who were not looking for you. A reel of your kitchen, your workshop or a before-and-after can reach people who had no idea you existed.
- Showing personality and recency. A page updated this week signals an active business. Stories and replies make you feel reachable.
- Starting a conversation. A DM is low effort for the customer, which is why so many enquiries begin there.
- Costing nothing to start. A phone and an hour a week is enough to begin.
Where Instagram fails a local business
- People searching with intent cannot find you. Someone typing “dentist near me open evenings” into Google is ready to book. Instagram posts rarely appear for that search, and AI assistants answering it read websites and Google Business Profiles, not your grid.
- Your information is scattered. Prices in a highlight from eight months ago, hours in a caption, the address in bio. A new visitor has to dig, and most will not.
- You do not control it. The algorithm decides who sees you. An account can be restricted or lost. Your audience is on rented ground.
- It does not finish the job. Booking, ordering, paying, reading detailed service information: Instagram hands all of that off to somewhere else. If that somewhere else is a DM thread, your team is doing manually what a page could do automatically.
- It is hard to look established. A business that is only on Instagram reads, to many customers, as a hobby or a side project, fairly or not.
What a website is good at
- Being found when it matters. Your pages, your Google Business Profile and your schema markup are what search engines and AI tools use to answer “who should I go to for X near Y”.
- Answering everything in one place. Services, prices or starting prices, hours, location, team, proof, how to book. Organised, current, and under your control.
- Finishing the job. Bookings, orders, enquiry forms, WhatsApp buttons and payment links that work at 11 pm without anyone on your team.
- Trust. A clean, fast, specific website is still the single strongest signal that a business is real and serious.
Where a website fails
A website does not reach new people on its own. It waits to be found. If nobody searches for what you do, or you do nothing to be found when they do, a website sits quietly. It also goes stale if it cannot be updated easily, and a stale site is worse than none.
So which comes first?
For almost every local business that depends on people searching with intent (clinics, repairs, tutors, salons, restaurants with bookings, trades, professional services), the order is:
- A Google Business Profile, done properly. Free, fast, and the single biggest factor in local search. Correct category, services, hours, photos, and a habit of asking for reviews.
- A small, fast website. Five to eight pages that answer the questions above, with one-tap contact. This is the thing the Business Profile, your Instagram bio, your WhatsApp catalogue and any future ads all point to.
- Instagram, consistently. Now it has somewhere to send people. Post about the work, link to the page that lets them act.
If your business is driven mostly by discovery and impulse (a café people stumble on, a maker selling one-off pieces, an event brand), Instagram can reasonably come first. Even then, a one-page site with your story, location and a way to order or book will catch the people who looked you up after seeing a post and found nothing.
Not sure which applies to you? Tell us about your business and we will say honestly which to do first, even if the answer is “keep doing what you are doing”.