Instagram or a website: what clients check before they contact you

I get asked this a lot, usually by someone with a decent Instagram following and a nagging feeling they're supposed to have a website. They want me to say yes or no. Usually I end up saying it depends, and then I ask them how they got their last three clients.

That's the useful question. Let's start there.

Where do your clients come from?

If they find you on Instagram by scrolling (a reel gets shared, someone sees your work in their feed and messages you), then Instagram is doing the job and a website is a nice extra. Plenty of tattoo artists, bakers and photographers live entirely like this, and I wouldn't tell them otherwise.

If they come through a referral ("my sister used you for her kitchen"), something else happens before they get in touch. They look you up. They search your name, or your business name plus the town, and they check whether you look real.

That's the check most people underestimate.

What the research says

The numbers on this are older and messier than marketing blogs make them sound, so here are three I could trace back to the original source.

• In a 2021 survey of 500 US consumers by Visual Objects, 76% said they look up a company's online presence before visiting it in person (press release).
• A 2018 SurveyMonkey study of 3,053 adults found that 26% of Americans, 17% of Brits and 16% of Canadians don't trust a company without a website at all. Among millennials it was 31% (SurveyMonkey).
• Stanford's Web Credibility Project asked 2,684 people to rate real sites in 2002. 46.1% of them judged credibility partly on how the site looked (summary). That study is old, but it matches what I see. People decide fast, and they decide on the surface.

Not one of these says "everyone needs a website." What they say is that a fair share of the people who were about to call you go and check first, and some of them stop there.

What Instagram can't do

Instagram is a feed. Feeds are built to show the newest thing. That's great for showing you're active and bad for almost everything a careful client wants to know:

• Prices. You can pin a post or put them in a Highlight, but then they're one tap away from a recipe someone reposted. People hate asking for prices in a DM. Some just don't.
• Search. A client in your town searching "kitchen fitter Leeds" or "wedding florist Lisbon" sees Google results. Your Instagram profile rarely ranks for a service. A page about that service, in that place, can.
• Your old work. Your best project from 2024 is 180 posts down. Nobody will scroll there.
• Ownership. Accounts get hacked or banned, and the algorithm changes without warning. A domain you own doesn't disappear because someone in California tweaked a ranking signal.

When Instagram really is enough

I'd honestly say keep going without a site if most of this is true:

• new clients mostly find you inside the app, not through Google or referrals,
• your work is visual and the photos explain it,
• your prices are simple, or you're booked months ahead anyway,
• you're not trying to raise your prices or move into a new type of client.

The last point is the one that changes things. Raising prices on Instagram alone is hard, because a potential client compares your profile to the next profile, and the profiles all look the same. A site with case studies, clear packages and a few proper testimonials gives you somewhere to explain why you cost more.

The middle option

You don't have to choose. The setup I build most often for small businesses is one fast page, or three or four at most. It has what you do, who it's for, prices or a "from" figure, five or six examples of your work, reviews, and a way to book. Your Instagram link-in-bio points to it, and so does your Google Business Profile. Instagram keeps doing discovery, and the site does the checking part.

It costs less than people expect. A one-page site with me starts at €1,190. The package most small businesses choose is €1,590: up to six pages, all the copy written for you, SEO and the first year of hosting. It takes about two weeks, which is less time than most people spend deciding whether to get one.

A quick test

Ask the next three new clients how they found you and whether they looked you up first. Don't guess. If two of them say "I googled you," you've got your answer.

Short answers