I was scrolling through my local community Facebook group this morning. (If you’ve never experienced the specific chaos of a local community Facebook group, I cannot recommend it highly enough as a source of completely unhinged entertainment.) Someone had posted venting about how local businesses don’t have websites anymore, and honestly, I had to put my coffee down.

Because I’ve been thinking about this for a while… but I’m a brand and web designer, so of course I have. Yet here, in this little postcode Facebook group, was a person with zero marketing or online business experience also feeling the same annoyance.

Talk about validation…

I find someone online whose content genuinely resonates with me, a coach, a mentor, a service provider, someone whose perspective makes me stop scrolling and actually think. I want to go deeper. I click the link in their bio and I find either nothing, or a Stan Store with three landing page links, at least one of which goes to something that stopped enrolling six months ago.

And I get it. I do. Social media feels like where the people are. Why build a whole website when your Instagram is already doing the work?

But here’s what I’ve noticed after 11 years of building brands and websites, and I say this with genuine love, your website not converting isn’t a sign you don’t need one. It’s a sign it needs work.

Those are two completely different diagnoses, and conflating them is costing you.

The comments on that Facebook post were doing something I see constantly. People citing the cost of hosting, the price of domains, the nightmare of maintenance, someone said they’d made two sales in three years and decided the website wasn’t worth it. And every single one of those objections, while completely understandable, was pointing at the wrong problem.

Domains cost about $20 a year. Most modern platform builders have hosting built in now, you’re not paying additional fees on top. If you want WordPress SEO functionality without the hosting bill, Showit exists. Shopify starts free then ‘increases’ to $1/mth. The financial barrier to having a proper web presence in 2026 is genuinely lower than it has ever been, and the misinformation circulating about what it costs is wild to me.

The average cost of running a bog standard website or online store in 2026 probably sits comfortably around $150/year all in, around 41¢ per day. But cost was never really the point anyway.

The point is ownership.

Your Instagram is rented land. Every follower you have, every piece of content you’ve ever posted, every DM thread with a warm lead, every saved post, every bit of social proof you’ve accumulated over years of showing up, none of that is yours. Meta can (and frequently do) change the algorithm overnight. They can pull accounts without warning or explanation and good luck reaching an actual human in support to rectify it. They can fundamentally restructure how the platform works and there is nothing you can do about it except adapt or leave.

Your website is the only thing you actually own.

Your offers laid out in a clear, structured way. Your pricing visible and easy to navigate. An enquiry flow that works for you while you’re asleep, or on the school run, or on holiday. That is yours in a way that no social platform can ever be.

The website that isn’t converting isn’t a dead end. It’s a signal. Maybe the copy isn’t doing its job. Maybe the offer structure is confusing. Maybe it’s not optimised for mobile and people are abandoning it before it even loads properly. Maybe the messaging no longer reflects who you’ve become since you built it, because you’ve grown and your brand quietly hasn’t kept up.

All of those things are fixable. None of them mean you should burn the website down and live on Instagram instead.

I’m going to step down from my soapbox now. But if you’ve been telling yourself you don’t need a website because yours never brought you business, I’d gently ask you to consider whether the website was actually the problem, or whether it was just easier to blame the website than to figure out what it was really trying to tell you…

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People come to me specifically when they’ve outgrown their brand and they know it. When they’re successful enough that a mediocre brand is actively costing them, and ready enough to go deep.

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