Do I Need a Website If I Have Instagram?

On July 10, 2025, Meta switched on search-engine indexing by default for public posts from professional Instagram accounts. Your carousels and reels became things Google can show. That change quietly retired the argument a lot of web designers were still using to sell you a site.

So the answer to whether you need a website if you have Instagram is still yes for most local businesses in Ottawa, but for a narrower and more practical set of reasons than the ones you'll read on every design studio's blog. Instagram got better at being found. It did not get better at being used.

Dollar figures below are Canadian, before 13% HST.

The part of this argument that just died

It applied automatically to public photos, videos, carousels and reels from business and creator accounts held by adults. Personal accounts and private accounts aren't included. There's a toggle under Account Privacy, "Allow public photos and videos to appear in search engine results," if you want it off.

Search your own shop name in Google and you'll likely see a few of your posts sitting there. That's real, and most of the articles answering this question haven't caught up to it.

Being indexed isn't the same as ranking, though. A reel about your Tuesday special is not going to beat an established local page for "hair salon Westboro," because Google is matching a query to a page that answers it, and your reel's caption is not that page. What the change actually bought you is brand-name search: someone who already heard your name finds your feed faster. That's worth having. It isn't customer acquisition.

The real problem: nobody can click

A professional account gets up to five links in the bio, a Meta feature since April 2023, and that's the whole allowance. URLs typed into captions aren't clickable. The phrase "link in bio" exists in the English language because of this one product decision.

Picture a Barrhaven barbershop at 11:40 on a Tuesday night. Someone's scrolling, sees a fade they like, and wants to book for Saturday. On Instagram, the path is: read the caption, remember to go up to the profile, tap the bio link, pick the right one of the five, wait for the in-app browser, land on a booking page. Or, more likely, send a DM and wait for a reply that arrives when you open your phone at 9am — by which point they've booked at the shop that let them pick a time themselves.

Every one of those taps sheds people. Not because your customers are impatient, but because it's midnight and they were half paying attention. A link they can tap once, from anywhere, is the entire difference.

The twelve questions you answer in DMs every week

Instagram is a feed. It's built so that the newest thing is on top and everything else falls away. That's exactly right for showing new work, and exactly wrong for the twelve questions every local business gets asked over and over.

Do you take walk-ins. Do you have parking. What's a men's cut cost. Are you open Family Day. Do you do gel or just polish. Is the patio dog-friendly. Right now the answers to those are scattered across a story that expired, a caption from March, and your own thumbs at 8pm answering the same DM for the fortieth time.

A page with your services, prices and hours on it answers all of those once, permanently, for everyone, including the person who would never have messaged you to ask.

Instagram and a website, side by side

	Your Instagram	Your own website
Cost to start	$0	$299 upfront, $95/mo at Kove Studios
Clickable links	Up to 5, profile only	Every word on the page
Hours, prices and services in one place	Scattered across posts and stories	A page anyone can find
Showing new work to people who follow you	Excellent	Weak
Someone searching "barber near me" at 8am	Rarely surfaces	This is the job it does
Taking a booking at 11pm without you	No	Yes
Running paid ads to a local radius	Excellent	Not directly
Survives your account being disabled	No	Yes
Yours to keep	No	Yes — domain in your name

Read down that table and the split is clear enough. Instagram is built to hold attention. A website is built to finish the transaction. The Ottawa businesses that do best run both and stop asking either one to do the other's job. We answered the Facebook version of this question separately, because Google's rules for business listings land differently there.

When Instagram on its own is genuinely enough

We'd rather write this list down than have you find out in month five that you didn't need us. Skip the website for now if:

• Your bookings already run through a platform with a real public page. If you're on Fresha, Booksy or Square Appointments and your clients can see your services, prices and open slots there without messaging you, you have most of a website already. Put that link in your bio and spend the money elsewhere.
• You're a maker selling one-off pieces. If every item is unique, sells in a day, and the feed is the catalogue, a site adds inventory you'd have to maintain by hand.
• You're booked out and turning people away. More customers would make your life worse. Nobody selling websites will tell you this.
• You're under a year in and still changing what you sell. Build the offer first. If you want to hold the name while you figure it out, our pre-launch page is $9.99 one-time with the domain held for three months.

That's four categories of business we've just talked out of hiring us, and all four are real.

The trust problem, which is getting worse

CIRA's 2026 Canadian Internet Trends report, a March 2026 survey of 2,000 Canadian internet users, found 53% had encountered AI-generated fake content and 74% had taken some action to protect their data because of privacy concerns. The same report found 65% prefer to buy from Canadian retailers when they can.

Read those together and you get the shape of the problem. Canadians are actively looking for signals that a business is real, local and Canadian, at the same moment that fake accounts have become cheap to produce. An Instagram profile with your name and your photos on it can be duplicated by anyone in about four minutes. A customer who lands on the copy has no reliable way to tell.

A .ca domain in your own name is the one signal that's hard to fake, and it's the one you can point customers at when it happens to you.

Which brings up the question you should be asking any monthly web provider, including us. Ours, in writing: your domain stays in your name, and your site is portable, so you can leave any time and we'll hand over the code. No exit fee to get your own website back. If a provider needs a paragraph to answer that, you have your answer.

What it costs to stop running your business out of a DM inbox

Our Standard package is $299 upfront and $95/mo — $337.87 and $107.35 with HST. Five custom pages, so services, prices, hours, about and contact each get their own, on your own domain, live in seven days. First year all in, including HST: $1,626.07.

If you need one page rather than five, Basic is $149 upfront and $65/mo, which is $168.37 and $73.45 with HST, live in five days.

Hosting, security updates and support are inside the monthly, not billed separately in month four. Twelve-month minimum, then month-to-month with 30 days notice. For the wider market context — what freelancers and agencies in Ontario charge, and the cases where a $6,000 quote is the right call — we laid it all out in what a website actually costs in Ontario.

Do this next

Open your own Instagram profile on your phone, the way a stranger would. Count the taps between seeing a post and being able to book, buy, or phone you. If it's more than two, that's the gap, and it's costing you the customers who weren't determined enough to make the trip.

Then, if you want to see what closing it looks like before spending anything, ask us for a free mockup — a real design for your business in 48 hours, no payment details. You can also read how the build runs or look at what we've made.