Every now and then, a prospect asks us a question like ‘Do I actually need a website? Don’t people buy from ChatGPT/Instagram/some other platform?’. If you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering the same thing.
The answer: yes. Yes, you still need a website if you’re running a business. No, [PLATFORM] isn’t a substitute. No, people’s buying behaviour hasn’t changed to the point that websites are now irrelevant.
What’s the Point of Having a Website?
Let’s pause on the question of ‘website vs. [PLATFORM]’ for a moment. Why do businesses have websites in the first place? After all, the world wide web has been around since 1989 – but people have been taking products and services to market for literally thousands of years. Why have these expensive digital shopfronts suddenly become so popular?
Well, the internet changed things. It’s so fully reshaped how we live, work and function that the old ways of making purchase decisions have evaporated. Previously, consumers had to spend much more time researching options. They might call different salespeople (hunted down via the Yellow Pages), visit stores in person, and chat to past customers.
But, in the early days of the internet, smart business owners realised that process added a lot of friction. How much easier would it be if prospective customers could get all the information they needed, instantly, from the comfort of their homes? The brands that built websites quickly found that it was a competitive advantage – unsurprisingly, consumers loved the convenience (and the autonomy).
Search engines simplified things even further. Suddenly, consumers didn’t need to know exactly where to look. They could just search for something – a product, a service, a provider – and the algorithmic power of Lycos, Yahoo! or AltaVista would serve up best-fit websites. Then, Google arrived in 1998, and the world as we know it started to form.
Today, consumers are used to being able to find information instantly. Their behaviour has been deeply, relentlessly ingrained over the past 35 years. Trying to wind back the clock simply doesn’t work. People expect that they can easily find all relevant information about your business online in one location. If you subvert that expectation – by not having a website, by having one that’s confusing, or by deliberately gating information so buyers have to call you –lost business and unhappy customers will likely follow.
There are 2 kinds of businesses that can get away with not having a website at all: extremely small local businesses, and extremely specialised businesses that operate in the enterprise market.
Cafes, hairdressers, and other local businesses can often survive for a while on word of mouth and foot traffic, particularly in tight-knit communities. However, not having an online presence means that newcomers to the area will struggle to discover them – and that becomes a problem as the area grows and competition intensifies.
At the other end of the spectrum are the extremely specialised businesses focused on enterprise decision-makers or high-net-worth individuals. They generally get new business via word of mouth and networking, and tend to be so reputation-based that a website is somewhat irrelevant. They’re the exception to the rule, though.
But What About an Alternative?
At this point, it’s tempting to list the various other ways you can fulfil the ‘one location, all the information’ expectation. Can’t I stuff everything onto my Facebook page? What about Google My Business? Or my LinkedIn?
Unfortunately, there are many good reasons why websites remain the dominant form of online shopfront.
1. You’re in Control of Your Website
Your website is limited by your creativity and your budget. That’s it. You can build whatever you want – and many brands do. You can have a million pages, you can have one page, you can have a plain-text, totally static site, you can have a site that’s completely dynamic and looks different to every user. It’s all in your hands.
No other platform in the world offers that level of customisability. In fact, most of the popular ‘alternatives’ – Instagram, Facebook, Amazon – are downright restrictive. The information you can display and the way you can display it are both heavily limited, making them less than ideal for building a memorable brand experience.
Just as importantly, you own your website. Anything built on social platforms like Facebook can be destroyed overnight as the algorithms change (which has happened plenty of times before).
2. A Website Improves Discoverability
Let’s assume you’re comfortable with letting a tech company like Facebook control your business’s future. What happens when you want to start getting found outside of Facebook?
Most social media pages are far less discoverable than websites. Search engines – and LLMs, which rely heavily on search engine indices – have been designed to understand well-structured, properly linked HTML documents. That’s what their web crawlers do best. (Google and Bing can crawl and index JavaScript-loaded content, but less cleanly than HTML, and many other search engines don’t.)
Social media pages don’t fit that description. It’s why you’ll almost never see Facebook or Instagram pages ranking for anything other than brand searches – and, when they do, they’ll almost always rank below the brand’s website.
Only websites can be surfaced in Google Maps, which is one of the main ways modern consumers find nearby shops and services. That’s particularly relevant for small local businesses (who are also less likely to have a website in the first place).
3. A Website Improves Credibility
Websites are a little like landline numbers. In Australia, actual landlines are mostly decommissioned. Anyone can buy a lookalike number through a VoIP vendor, regardless of where they’re actually based. But there’s still a lingering perception among consumers that a 07 or a 02 number is ‘more legitimate’ than a mobile or toll-free number – even though they aren’t.
Today, a website is easier to build than it ever has been. Drag-and-drop builders like Squarespace are built for people who have no idea how to code. Claude and other chatbots can spin up fully populated HTML pages in minutes. The technical barriers to creating a site have almost evaporated. But, to the average consumer, an attractive, professionally crafted website still signals legitimacy. It’s not a solid trust indicator, but it’s a first step, one that indicates a real human, somewhere, put time and effort into creating a digital shopfront.
You can also use your website to curate social proof from other locations. Review sliders, written testimonials, case studies, video interviews – each can be showcased to full advantage on HTML pages. That isn’t the case for a single other non-website platform.
4. You Own Your Website
The biggest benefit of a website is also one of its most overlooked: it’s yours. Both the platform and its content are fully owned and controlled by you. Provided your site complies with applicable laws, no-one can force you to change or delete anything.
Compare that to virtually any social media platform. Meta et al have superficially friendly terms of service. (‘Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content.’) Realistically, though, you’re at their mercy. If they want to throttle your page’s visibility, change what information can be displayed, or even remove it altogether, they can do it. Recourse is non-existent.
And, if you think I’m fearmongering, Facebook has algorithmically gutted small businesses many, many times in the past. (Here’s one, semi-recent example.) All social media platforms walk a knife’s edge between advertising dollars and user experience, and you simply cannot trust them to always prioritise your brand’s visibility. A website puts you in the driver’s seat – for better or for worse.
Yes, You Need a Website
Virtually all businesses need a website. Time and cost shouldn’t be barriers, either. If you’re just starting out and your budget is tight, do it yourself – you can build a one-page brochure site with any one of the hundreds of tools out there.
On the other hand, if you’re a semi-established business, it’s faster, easier and more effective to pay an experienced web development agency to do it for you. They’ll generally handle the whole process (hosting, domain, DNS, security, updates), which frees you up to focus on more strategic initiatives. They’ll also make sure the copy, UX design, and site structure align with best practices and are optimised for search.
Your business’s health should never depend on a single marketing channel. Build a site you own, promote it in different places, and ignore the armchair experts who tell you to move to Facebook instead.
