Try this before you decide anything. If your Instagram account disappeared tonight, with no warning and no way to appeal, what would you still have tomorrow morning?
For a lot of businesses in India the honest answer is a phone full of DMs and no way to reach the people who were about to buy.
Hold that thought, because the standard argument for building a website has quietly stopped being true, and most of the advice you will read on this question is running on a script from 2024.
The argument that expired last year
The usual case goes: Instagram content cannot be found on Google, so without a website you are invisible in search.
That has not been true since 10 July 2025.
Public professional and creator accounts are now indexed by Google and Bing. Photos, videos, carousels and Reels all qualify, along with the captions and the alt text, for anything posted from 1 January 2020 onwards. Stories are excluded, so are direct messages, personal and private accounts, and anyone under eighteen.
There is also an opt-out setting, so it is worth checking yours is not switched on if you want the visibility.
If somebody tells you your Instagram cannot show up on Google, they are working from an out of date script, and you should wonder what else in their advice is from 2024.
So the search argument for a website is genuinely weaker than it was. Which makes it worth being precise about what you actually lose, because the real reasons are less obvious and considerably more serious.
What you actually lose
You do not own the distribution, and the rent keeps going up.
Average organic reach on an Instagram feed post has fallen from about 9.34% in 2023 to roughly 5.8% now, and it is down about 12% in the last year alone. Typical posts reach somewhere between 3.5% and 7.6% of your own followers.
Put a number on that. Ten thousand followers, built over years, and an average post is now seen by two or three hundred of them.
You did not build an audience. You rented access to one, on terms the landlord revises whenever it suits the advertising business. That is not a conspiracy, it is simply what the platform is for, and pretending otherwise is how people end up shocked.
Being indexed is not the same as being competitive.
Your posts can now appear in Google. They appear as social posts, structured the way Instagram structures them, competing for queries you did not choose.
A caption cannot do what a service page does. You cannot build depth on a topic, link related pages together, lay out pricing properly, or answer the specific commercial question somebody types before buying. Ranking for your own brand name is easy and nearly worthless, because those people already found you. Ranking for what you sell is a different job and a caption is the wrong tool for it.
The account can go, and there is nobody to ring.
It is rare. It is also terminal, and there is no meaningful appeal process for a small business in India. Every relationship you built lives inside a system you cannot export from.
You cannot measure anything properly.
You get the metrics Meta chooses to show you, about the traffic Meta controls, and none of it connects to what actually happened in your business afterwards.
When Instagram alone genuinely is enough
I would rather be useful than sell you a website, so here are the cases where the answer is honestly no, not yet.
If your product is visual, the purchase is impulsive, and sales close in DMs, Instagram is doing the whole job. Jewellery, cakes, clothing, home decor. Adding a website changes very little except your workload.
If you are early and still finding out whether anybody wants the thing, build the audience first. A website before you have demand is a way of feeling productive without being useful, and I have watched several people spend six weeks on a site instead of six weeks talking to customers.
If you are the product, meaning a personal brand where people are buying access to you specifically, the platform is where that relationship lives.
And if your customers find you through Google Maps rather than search, your Business Profile is doing more work than a website would.
In all four cases, wait. Just do the one thing below in the meantime.
The minimum that actually protects you
The answer to this question is almost never a big website, and framing it as a big project is why people postpone it for two years.
What you need is one page you control, with four things on it. What you sell. Some proof it works. Prices, or at least honest ranges. A way to contact you that does not route through Meta.
Then the part that matters more than the page: a list. Emails, or phone numbers for WhatsApp, collected steadily from people who bought or nearly bought. That list is the only asset in this entire discussion that nobody can switch off.
That is a weekend of work, not a quarter. And if the account does vanish, it is the difference between a bad week and starting again from zero.
If you are also thinking about selling properly rather than just taking orders in DMs, I went through the marketplace versus own store question separately, and the margin arithmetic there decides more than most people expect.
The way I would put it
Instagram is a channel. A website is an asset. Both are useful and they are not the same category of thing.
The mistake is not using Instagram, which is the correct place to be for a large share of Indian consumer businesses. The mistake is mistaking a channel for a business, and only noticing the difference on the morning the channel stops working.
The search argument for a website got weaker last July. The ownership argument got stronger, because reach fell again this year and will fall again next year. Build the one page and the list. Skip the rest until you have a reason.
If you’d like to think through whether your business is in the wait category or the build category, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch. My notes on how I work cover more of the thinking.