Your Instagram is not your home

A confession to start. When I was planning our wedding, I found more suppliers on Instagram than anywhere else on earth. Eleven at night, phone an inch from my face, tapping through tagged photos and saved posts, quietly building an entire imaginary wedding out of other people's Saturdays. Instagram is genuinely brilliant at that. It is a shop window the size of the planet and it never once closes.

And yet. Every single time I found someone I loved, the very next thing I did was go and look for their website. Not because Instagram had done anything wrong. Because it had done its job. It had made me interested, and now I needed to actually know things, and Instagram is hopeless at telling you things.

So let me answer the question I hear from suppliers all the time, usually a little defensively. Do you really need a website if you already have a good Instagram? Yes. And I say that as the bride who found half her suppliers on the app and still went hunting for the website every time.

What Instagram is brilliant at

Being found, first and foremost. The algorithm puts your work in front of couples who have never heard of you and never would have otherwise, and that is close to magic. It is brilliant at personality too, at momentum, at the daily drip of "we are here, we are good, look what we made at the weekend". If you are a wedding supplier and you are not on Instagram, you are making your life harder than it needs to be, and I will not be the one to talk you out of it.

So this is not me telling you to log off. I love it. It is just not a website, and it was never trying to be one.

What Instagram simply cannot do

It cannot show a couple a whole wedding, in order, the way the day actually unfolded. It shows nine squares and a lot of scrolling.

It cannot be found on Google. When a couple types "wedding florist near Bath" into a search bar, and thousands of them do every week, Instagram is not what comes back. Websites are.

It cannot answer the boring, essential questions. Do you travel? What do you roughly cost? Are you even free on our date? A couple should not have to slide into your DMs to work out whether you are worth a conversation.

And here is the one that should genuinely keep you up at night. It is not yours. Your entire shop window sits on land you rent from a company that can change the rules, throttle your reach, suspend your account or simply decide that this year it likes video, and it will not ask you first. Building your whole business on Instagram is building your house on someone else's field. It is a lovely field. It is not your field.

The grid is the introduction. The website is the conversation.

This is how it finally clicked for me. Instagram brings people to your door. Your website is what happens once they are inside and deciding whether to stay.

The mistake I saw over and over while planning was suppliers pouring everything into the introduction and forgetting the conversation completely. Beautiful grids leading to websites last touched in 2021, or worse, to no website at all, just a Linktree and a prayer. Every one of those made me hesitate, and I was ready to book. Imagine the couples who were only half sure.

So what goes where

Keep the highlights on the grid. The one stunning frame, the moment, the behind-the-scenes, the thing that stops a thumb mid-scroll. That is what the grid is for and it does it beautifully.

Put everything that helps someone actually decide on your website. Full weddings, told properly. The practical facts, findable in seconds. A real sense of what you are like to work with. A way to enquire that takes ten seconds and does not depend on an app. The things that turn a saved post into a booked date.

Do both and they feed each other. The grid sends people to the site, the site closes it, and the couple never once feels like they had to do any work. Neglect the website and you are pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it, wondering why it never fills.

The short version

Instagram is where couples find you. Your website is where they choose you. Love the grid, post to the grid, grow on the grid. Just do not mistake it for home. Home is the place you own, the place that works while you sleep, the place no algorithm can quietly take off you overnight.

Go and look at your own website now, honestly, as if you were a couple who had just fallen for one of your posts. If what you find would make you hesitate, that is worth knowing. It is also very fixable.