Instagram is where they look. It is not where they search.
For some businesses a social account really is enough for now. Here is how to tell whether yours is one of them.
When an account genuinely is enough
If you sell through conversation, your customers already follow you, and new ones arrive because somebody tagged a friend, then a website would sit there being beautiful and doing nothing.
That is a real situation and it describes plenty of small shops. Spend the money on stock or on photographs instead.
The first thing it cannot do: be searched
Somebody typing a dress and a city into a search box will not be shown your grid. Search engines read pages, and a caption inside an app is not one that they can weigh.
That is the whole gap. Not that social does not work, but that it works only for people who already know to look for you.
The second: be quoted by an assistant
Ask an assistant for a shop like yours and it answers from text it can read and check. A business that exists only inside an app has nothing for it to read, so it names somebody else.
This is newer and it is moving quickly, which is why it is worth knowing about before it is urgent.
The third: belong to you
An account is borrowed. The rules change, the reach changes, and occasionally the account is gone on a Tuesday for a reason nobody will explain to you.
Everything on a domain you own survives all of that, which is the argument for having somewhere to land people even if the looking happens elsewhere.
Questions worth asking
Can I have a listing and an account and no website?
For a while, genuinely yes, and for some trades indefinitely. A map listing covers being found nearby and the account covers being looked at. What neither covers is the page that answers a question in detail.
Will a website get me more followers?
No, and anybody promising that is confusing two different jobs. A site brings people who were searching for what you sell and had never heard of you, which is a different group entirely.
Can the site show my Instagram feed?
Not pulled in live. Nothing on the sites we build loads from anybody else, which is part of why they are fast, and an embedded feed breaks the day the platform changes something. Your best pictures get copied over and stay.
What is the smallest useful website?
One page that says what you sell, where you are, when you are open and how to reach you, in the languages your customers use. That is a genuinely small job and it is more than most competitors have.
I post every day and it is not working. Would a site fix it?
Probably not on its own. If posting daily is not converting, the problem is usually what you sell, to whom, or at what price, and a website built on top of that question will not answer it either.
Send us the account and what you sell, and we will tell you honestly whether a site would earn its money yet. Get a free audit.
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