"Do I really need a website when I already have Facebook and Instagram?"

I get asked this regularly — and it almost always comes at the same moment: reach has just halved and nobody can say why.

Having worked with a lot of small businesses on exactly this question, I keep landing in the same place: you need both, but the website has to be the foundation. Here's where that order comes from.

Why social media alone isn't enough

Start with the thing that should worry every business owner: your Facebook page and your Instagram account are not yours. That's rented space.

The terms can change overnight. When Meta reweighted feeds toward posts from friends and away from posts from pages, organic reach for business profiles fell off a cliff. No warning, no transition period, no appeal. Accounts built over years lost contact with their own followers in a matter of weeks.

The pattern that follows is predictable. Reach drops, so the owner adds ad budget. The cost of reaching people climbs, because everyone else is bidding for the same attention. The end state: to reach the people who already chose to follow you, you now pay — and you pay more each year.

You can lose the account. Suspended over a report that turns out to be baseless. Taken over because someone got the password. Recovering a business profile can take weeks and doesn't always work. And platforms do simply stop mattering — remember Myspace?

You don't get the data. Platform analytics tell you how many people saw a post. They don't tell you who those people are, how they found you, or what path they took toward buying. You don't have their email addresses, so you can't reach them anywhere except on the platform's terms.

Why the website is your own premises

A website is the only piece of digital ground you actually own. A domain and hosting is property. An account on a platform is a tenancy.

What that buys you in practice:

  • You change the design and the copy when you want, without waiting for what a platform allows.
  • You collect contacts directly — form, newsletter, phone.
  • You see the whole visitor path in your analytics, not just an impression count.
  • You write at whatever length the subject needs, with no character limit and no fight for reach.
  • You can rank in Google — which means traffic from people already looking for you.

That last difference is the biggest and the most consistently underrated. Someone typing "custom furniture" plus their city into Google has already made the decision and is looking for someone to do the work. You don't have to convince them they want furniture. Someone scrolling Instagram isn't looking for anything — you reach them by accident, and you have to build the need before you can meet it.

Search is slow. The first results usually take months, and that's long enough to put people off. But search traffic doesn't stop when you stop paying, and it doesn't depend on what an algorithm happens to be promoting this quarter.

There's also credibility. When someone hears about you through a recommendation, the first thing they do is look you up. Instagram will show them your best photographs. A website shows the services, the price range, the past work, the terms, and who they'd actually be dealing with. That's the difference between "looks nice" and "I can work with these people."

How the two should support each other

The arrangement that works is simple: social media builds the relationship and distributes the work; the website turns it into an enquiry.

In practice:

  1. You write something genuinely useful — a guide, a project write-up, an answer to the question clients ask you every week.
  2. You publish it in full on your own site.
  3. On social you post an extract, the conclusion, or one strong photograph — with a link to the full version.
  4. Whoever clicks lands on your ground, where they see the offer, the past work and a way to contact you.

Notice which way the traffic flows. Instagram is the natural home for stories, behind-the-scenes and everyday photos — that content genuinely lives there. But anything meant to work for longer than 24 hours should have a version on your site. A post from last year is effectively unfindable. An article from last year can still be bringing you traffic today.

A practical split of effort

If you run a service business or sell B2B:

Website — roughly 70% of the effort

  • search optimisation around the phrases your clients actually type
  • an obvious, low-friction way to get in touch or book
  • past work and case studies
  • a blog that answers real questions

Social media — roughly 30%

  • posting consistently, a few times a week
  • answering comments and messages
  • pointing traffic back to the site

If you run a B2C business where image and daily contact do most of the selling — a café, a salon, a boutique — the split evens out to something like 60/40. Social is a real sales channel for you and there's no sense pretending otherwise.

The order stays the same, though. The place you own comes first.

Where to start

Now:

  1. If you don't have a site, build one. It doesn't have to be big; it has to be yours. I've written separately about how to prepare the content for it.
  2. Cover the search basics: page titles, descriptions, and your location where it genuinely belongs.
  3. Add a contact form and start collecting enquiries somewhere you control, rather than in an Instagram inbox.

Then:

  1. Be on the platforms where your customers actually are. Not all of them.
  2. Publish consistently, without chasing volume — one good piece a week beats five fillers.
  3. Always leave a route back to the site.

Long term:

  1. Invest in search. It's one of the few marketing channels that gets cheaper over time rather than more expensive.
  2. Build an email list. It's the only contact channel nobody can take away from you.
  3. Treat social as a distribution channel, not as your entire presence online.

And once the site is doing real work, keep it working — an unmaintained site quietly stops earning, which is a separate topic I've written about.

In short

Algorithms change. Your domain doesn't.

An email address someone gave you five years ago still works. A domain you've held for eight years still works. The organic reach your marketing depends on today could look completely different in six months, and nobody is going to notify you.

If you're building a business that should still exist in five years, you need more than a profile on somebody else's platform.

Want to work through this for your own business — how to connect the site to social, where to start with search, how to move someone from follower to enquiry? Get in touch and we'll go through it properly.