Do you need a website if you already have Instagram?

Plenty of Kenyan businesses run entirely on Instagram and WhatsApp, and some of them should keep doing exactly that. The question is not whether Instagram works — it clearly does. It is which specific things it cannot do, and whether those things are costing you.

What Instagram is genuinely better at

• Showing new work constantly, to people who already follow you.
• Being where your customers already are, with no extra step.
• Costing nothing and needing no one to maintain it.
• Direct conversation. A DM converts faster than a contact form ever will.

What it cannot do

• Be found by someone searching. Nobody googles "steel fabricator Nairobi" and lands on a grid of posts. That search goes to a website, or to a competitor's.
• Answer questions without you. Every price, every lead time, every "do you deliver to Nakuru" is a message you personally have to reply to. A website answers those while you are asleep.
• Be organised. A customer cannot find the job you posted eight months ago, and neither can you.
• Look established to a corporate buyer. Procurement departments and insurers ask for a website. Some will not proceed without one.
• Belong to you. The account is borrowed. People lose them — to hacks, to policy, to a phone number that changed — and everything goes with it.

The honest test

Ask yourself where your last ten customers came from. If nine were referrals and DMs, Instagram is doing its job and a website is a lower priority than better photographs. If you are quoting the same three questions ten times a week, or you have lost a job because someone senior could not find you, that is the cost showing up.

What most businesses actually need

Not a large site. Four or five pages that state what you do, show the work, answer the repeated questions, and put a WhatsApp button on every screen — with Instagram still doing what it is good at. The website is not a replacement for the feed. It is the thing the feed points at, and the thing search can find.