A great many Nigerian businesses run entirely on Instagram and WhatsApp. Orders come through direct messages, the catalogue lives in a highlight, payment is a transfer, and it works. Then somebody tells them they need a website, and they are not sure whether that is advice or a sales pitch.
We build websites. Read this knowing that. It is still worth writing honestly, because sending someone a proposal for something they do not need is a bad trade for both sides.
The rule that settles it for a lot of businesses
Start here, because it is the one fact that decides the question outright for some readers, and almost nobody knows it.
To qualify for a Google Business Profile, Google requires that a business makes in-person contact with customers during its stated hours. Working from that, it lists businesses that are not eligible, and the list explicitly names brands, organisations, artists and other online-only businesses.
So if you sell entirely online and never meet a customer face to face, you cannot have a Business Profile. Not a harder version of one. Not eligible. Which means you have no listing on Maps, no panel beside your name in search results, and nothing for Google to show when somebody looks you up.
For that business, the website is not an upgrade. It is the only property you are allowed to own.
If you do meet customers in person, whether at a shop or by travelling to them, the picture changes completely, because the Business Profile is available to you and it is free.
Google used to offer a website, and took it away
This is worth knowing because some businesses are still relying on it without realising what happened.
Google Business Profiles used to include a small free website, usually on a business.site address. On 5 March 2024 those sites stopped being available, and visitors were redirected to the Business Profile instead. That redirect was temporary. After 10 June 2024, anybody visiting those addresses got a page not found error.
There is no replacement. Google removed the feature and pointed people at third party builders. If your business card still carries a business.site address, it is a dead link, and has been for over a year.
What a Business Profile does for you, and where it stops
If you are eligible, the profile is genuinely powerful and free. It puts you on Maps, carries your hours, phone number, photos and reviews, and appears beside your name in search results.
Where it stops is worth being clear about. It shows what Google lets it show, in Google's layout, on Google's terms. You cannot explain anything at length. You cannot answer the five questions every customer asks before they buy. You cannot be found for the phrases people search when they do not yet know your name, which is where most new customers come from.
And you do not own it. Your profile can be suspended, edited by the public, or restricted, and your recourse is an appeals form.
What about Instagram
Instagram can be found in Google, but only under conditions most businesses do not realise they have to meet.
By default, Instagram asks search engines not to index the photos and videos in posts, stories, reels and highlights. It permits indexing only when three things are true at once: the account holder is over eighteen, the account is public, and it is a professional account. Even then, only material posted from 1 January 2020 onwards is covered, and Meta is clear that permitting indexing is not the same as guaranteeing it, because it does not control what Google does.
So an Instagram-only business is not invisible in search, but its visibility depends on another company's settings and can change without notice.
Where a website genuinely earns its cost
Four situations, and if none of them applies to you, be sceptical of anyone selling you one.
You are not eligible for a Business Profile. Covered above. This is the clearest case there is.
People search for what you do before they know who you are. If customers find you by searching your category rather than your name, you need pages that can appear for those searches. A social profile cannot do this.
Something needs explaining before somebody buys. A price that varies, a process with stages, a product that needs specifying. If your sales conversation repeats the same explanation every time, that explanation should exist somewhere you can send people.
You want to be understood by AI assistants. ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest build their picture of a business from material they can read. A business whose entire existence is inside an app that restricts indexing gives them very little to work from.
Where it honestly does not
A brochure site that repeats your Instagram bio, never gets updated, and is found by nobody is money spent on an object rather than an outcome. If your orders come through WhatsApp, your customers find you by referral, and your business has no explaining to do, a five page site will not change your revenue. It will just exist.
A better sequence for that business is a properly built Google Business Profile, if you are eligible, then reviews, then the profiles sorted out, and then a website when one of the four situations above starts applying. Which it usually does eventually.
The question to ask yourself
Not "should I have a website". Ask what a stranger who has never heard your name types into Google when they need what you sell, and then ask what they find.
If the answer is your competitor, you now know what the website is for. If the answer is that nobody searches that way in your business, you have just saved yourself a cost.
Our free deep digital audit answers that question with evidence rather than opinion, whether or not you have a website today.