Do you need a website if you already have Instagram?

Short answer: Instagram doesn't replace a website — and not for the reason you've heard a hundred times. It isn't about reach, and it isn't about looking professional. It's that the profile isn't yours. You're borrowing it, and the lender writes the rules.

The longer, more honest answer: if your shop runs on Instagram and customers keep walking in, you don't need to panic-build a website tomorrow. But you should know what you're leaning on.

What Instagram is genuinely good at

Start with the case for it, which is stronger than website salespeople like to admit.

• It costs nothing and takes about half an hour to set up.
• It's built for the device you already have in your hand all day.
• People can reply, ask a question, send you a message. A website can't do that.
• If your work is visible — flowers, food, hair, cakes, tattoos, renovations — real photos from an ordinary day beat any sales copy you could write.

So if someone tells you social media is a distraction, they're wrong. A well-kept profile is a shop window, and a good one.

Where a profile on its own starts to cost you

The trouble starts when the profile is the only thing you have.

You own none of it. Accounts get locked and hacked. It's rare. When it happens, it all goes at once: your photos, your messages, the only channel your customers have to reach you. There's nobody to call. You wait and hope.

You don't decide who sees you. The platform does. People who follow you don't automatically see what you post, and you have no say in that. Your own site shows everyone the same thing, every time.

Everything scrolls away. The holiday hours you posted three weeks ago are effectively unfindable. Someone wondering at 10am on a Saturday whether you're open won't scroll forty pictures — they'll go to whoever answered the question. Those unglamorous details are what win customers, and they need somewhere to sit still.

Not everyone is there. Someone who's 62 and needs a roofer opens Google, not Instagram.

What your own site does that a profile can't

The difference isn't design. It's an address that belongs to you.

• You own the domain. Rebuild everything in five years and the address still works — every business card, every van, every directory listing still points to the right place.
• You decide what people see first. No algorithm in between, nobody else's ads beside your work.
• It works for local searches. When someone types "bike repair" and the name of your town, your own page is the tool for that — here's how to get found in your own town.
• You can take your things with you. The words and the photos live with you.

And it doesn't have to be big. What a small business website actually needs often fits on a single page: who you are, what you do, where you are, when you're open, how to reach you. More than that mostly gets in the way early on.

You don't actually have to choose

This gets framed as a versus question, and it isn't one. The two do different jobs. Instagram is where you show up and stay in people's day; your site is where people land when they're ready to hire you or drive over. Point the profile at the site, put the site on your card and your van, and let each do what it's good at.

The awkward part is that the profile is the fun one. It gives you likes and replies today, while a page with your opening hours on it gives you nothing back — right up until the Saturday morning it quietly wins you a customer you'll never know you almost lost.

What to do this week

1. Back up your photos. Get the pictures you've uploaded onto your own computer or into a cloud drive. If they only exist in the profile, you don't have them.
2. Write down the five things every customer asks you. Those are your website.
3. Check whether the domain you want is still free. It costs a few euros a year, and you can hold it long before anything sits behind it.

One test worth running: if your account vanished tonight, how would somebody find your phone number tomorrow? If nothing comes to mind, that's the gap — not the design of your feed.

If you'd rather someone else handled the site part, that's what Foliovo does — small, honest pages, and the free preview shows you yours before you pay anything. And if you'd rather build it yourself, genuinely, do that. The point isn't that you need us. The point is that the address should be yours.