Published on · 6 min read
Website or social media: what's the difference?
"I already have an Instagram page, why would I need a website?" It's the question that comes up most often. The answer fits in one image: social media is the street; your website is your shop window.
You rent, you don't own
On a social network you are a tenant. The platform sets the rules, decides who sees your posts, and can change its mind without warning. It can also suspend an account by mistake — which happens more often than people think, and there is usually nobody to appeal to.
The day that happens, you lose your posts, your followers and your way of being contacted, all at once. Years of work can vanish overnight.
Your website depends on nobody. Your words, your photos, your clients: it all stays yours, whatever happens to the platforms.
One catches attention, the other converts it
Social media is excellent for getting noticed. You show a finished job, a new piece, the atmosphere of your workshop. People scroll, discover, take an interest.
But the scrolling never stops. After your post comes a friend's, then a video, then an advert. The attention is real but fleeting, and nothing about it is designed to make someone contact you.
A website does the opposite. Nobody lands there by accident: they come because they are looking for you. The whole page is built to lead to a single action — book an appointment, request a quote, call you.
Hence the right way to combine them: social media draws the attention, the website turns it into a client.
Google doesn't read social media
When somebody types "carpenter Morges" into Google, it is websites that come back. Instagram or Facebook posts almost never appear in those results.
That is a decisive difference. On social media you mostly reach people who already follow you. On Google you reach people searching for your trade right now, who have never heard of you — in other words, your future clients.
A well-built site makes you visible to people who would otherwise never have come across you.
Credibility isn't the same
A social media page takes five minutes to create, for free. Everyone knows it, and it shows: a page on its own reassures very little when there is a real budget at stake.
A proper site, with an address in your own name and a matching email address, sends a different signal: this person has invested in their business and intends to stay. For a quote running into thousands of francs, that detail carries weight.
In short
Social media and a website are not rivals: they do different jobs. Social media gets you known, the website gets you chosen.
If you can only keep one of them up to date, keep the website. A social page abandoned eight months ago does more harm than no page at all — whereas a good site keeps working for you without asking for anything.