Do you need a website if you already have Facebook and Instagram?

You have a Facebook page where new work appears regularly, and an Instagram where customers message you directly. Orders are coming in. So the question is entirely fair: why spend money on a website when everything already works?

The honest answer is that social media and a website don’t do the same job. They don’t replace each other — and that is exactly why relying on profiles alone often turns out to cost more over time than it first appears.

A profile isn’t yours — it’s rented

Your Facebook page and Instagram account don’t belong to you. The content you put there is yours, but the place it sits in belongs to the platform. The rules about what is allowed, who gets shown your post and what it will cost you in future are not written by you.

In practice that means a few things. An account can be blocked or stolen, and getting it back from an automated system is often a long, unpredictable process. Reach changes without warning: a post that used to reach a large share of your followers may today reach only a small fraction of them. And it hurts most when the customer contacts that existed only inside that account disappear along with it — conversations, comments, saved messages.

A website is property. The domain is in your name, the content sits in your files, and it can’t be switched off overnight because of somebody else’s algorithm. Social media is where you talk. Your website is where you exist.

A profile won’t save you in search

People don’t search for services on Instagram. When somebody suddenly needs a roofer, an accountant or a cake for an order, they open Google or ask ChatGPT. The internal search in Facebook and Instagram isn’t built for questions like that, and in practice it doesn’t serve them.

Search engines see social content poorly. Posts are short, the text often sits inside the image itself, and the platforms would rather people didn’t leave them for Google. The result is that your best work can be beautifully published and still appear nowhere in a search for “tiler in Riga”.

The same happens in AI answers. When ChatGPT or a Google AI overview recommends companies, it draws on publicly readable, well-organised data — name, service, city, price and contacts in one place. That kind of material lives on a website. It isn’t in an Instagram profile.

What a profile can’t explain

Social media is good as a shop window, but not for finishing the conversation. It’s an easy place to show what finished work looks like. It’s much harder to explain there what exactly you do, which regions you cover, roughly what it costs, how the process runs and what the terms are.

For a customer who is already ready to pay, those are the important questions. They don’t want to scroll through two-year-old posts to work out a price range. If the answers aren’t visible straight away, they send a message — or, more often, go to whoever had the answers ready.

And some things simply can’t go in a profile at all. A booking calendar, an enquiry form with a file attachment, a price calculator, a product catalogue with filters, payment on the spot. All of that lives on a website.

So should you abandon your profiles?

No, and that is something we never recommend. Social media does a job a website doesn’t: it reminds people who aren’t looking for you yet that you exist, and it shows your work in a live, everyday form.

They work best as a pair. The profile attracts attention and builds trust; the website turns that into an enquiry and at the same time works in the searches where a profile will never appear. One brings people in, the other keeps them — and belongs to you.

How we solve this

In our website development work we start with the question of what the site actually has to do in your case: sell, take enquiries, show prices, or take the load off your direct messages. If social media already works for you, we build the site to complement it rather than duplicate it — clear services, prices, contacts and the SEO fundamentals a profile doesn’t have. A starter site costs from €350 and is ready in about two weeks; a full business site with a blog and several languages starts from €700.

If you’re not sure whether a website is needed in your situation at all, or how big it should be, book a consultation. We’ll look at how customers find you today and tell you honestly what would give you the biggest gain.