Why this question matters more than people think.
Most new operators treat this as a timing question — which do I do first? But it is really a strategy question: where do your customers actually look for you, and what do they need to see when they get there? Get that wrong and you can spend six months building an audience on Instagram that never converts, or you can pay for a website that sits there doing nothing because nobody is sending traffic to it.
I have watched both go wrong. A candlemaker in Canterbury who spent nearly a year posting daily to Instagram, built 2,000 followers, and could not reliably take an order because she had no product page, no checkout, and no way for someone to buy at 11pm on a Tuesday without DMing her first. And a plumber in Whitstable who paid £1,800 for a four-page website in 2023, got it beautifully designed, and then did absolutely nothing to put people in front of it. Two years on, it had 40 visits a month, mostly from his mum.
Neither of those was a bad person. They just made the same mistake: they started with the format they felt comfortable with rather than the format their customers actually needed.
The core difference between the two.
Instagram is a discovery platform. People find you there by accident — through hashtags, through shares, through the algorithm serving your content to someone who did not know you existed. That is genuinely powerful, but it is borrowed land. Instagram owns the relationship. If Meta decides to change the algorithm tomorrow, or if your account gets flagged for something arbitrary, your audience evaporates. I have seen it happen. It is not a paranoid worry, it is a documented risk.
A website, by contrast, is owned infrastructure. Your domain, your content, your Google rankings, your email list — nobody can take those away from you. The tradeoff is that a website does not build its own audience. You have to send people to it, either through search (which takes time), paid ads (which cost money), or by linking from somewhere like, say, Instagram.
That is where the two actually work together. But you need to know which one is doing which job.
When I would tell you to start with Instagram.
If your product or service is inherently visual, if the thing you make or do is something people want to see before they buy, and if your target customer is already spending time on Instagram — then starting there makes sense. Flower arrangements. Wedding styling. Food. Bespoke furniture. Tattoos. Photography. In these categories, Instagram functions almost like a portfolio, and the DM is the first touchpoint of a sale. You can run a real business from that for a while.
It also makes sense if you are still figuring out what your offer is. Posting to Instagram is cheap and fast feedback. You can try six different angles in six weeks and see what people respond to. You cannot do that as easily with a website, where changing the whole premise costs time and potentially money.
That said — even if you start with Instagram, I would still register a domain name on day one. Something like yourname.co.uk costs under £10 a year at Namecheap or 123-reg, and it stops someone else grabbing it while you are building. You can park it for now. Just own it.
When I would tell you to start with a website.
If you are a service business where trust is the main barrier — a therapist, an accountant, a builder, a web developer (ahem), a solicitor, a cleaning company — then a website does work that Instagram simply cannot. People searching Google for "kitchen fitter Ashford" or "bookkeeper Canterbury" are not looking for personality content. They are looking for evidence that you are legitimate, that you are qualified, that others have used you, and that they can contact you easily. A Google Business Profile and a clean website with a phone number answers all four of those questions in about ten seconds. An Instagram page does not.
Likewise, if your customer is over 45, if they are a business rather than a consumer, or if the purchase decision involves any real sum of money, the website wins. Nobody is going to commission £8,000 of landscaping work based on an Instagram DM without first checking you have a proper web presence. They just are not.
And if you are setting up an online shop — even a modest one — you need a website. There is no version of this where a product-based business runs long-term from Instagram alone. Shopify starts at £25 a month, WooCommerce runs on a WordPress hosting plan that costs from about £5 a month, and both give you a real checkout that works at any hour without your involvement. That matters.
The mistake of treating Instagram as a website substitute.
This one comes up constantly, especially with younger founders who grew up on social media and find Instagram more natural to manage than a website. The logic goes: everyone is on Instagram, I can post my prices in my bio, I can take enquiries through DMs, why do I need anything else?
The problems tend to arrive around month four or five. You cannot be found on Google. You cannot take a payment without a third-party workaround. You have no email list — every contact you have is mediated by Meta's platform. You cannot run any kind of automated follow-up or booking system. And if a potential customer wants to check your reviews, they are stuck with whatever comments happen to be visible on your posts rather than a proper testimonial or Google review section.
More practically: try getting a business bank account, applying for a trade account with a supplier, or signing up to a trade directory with nothing but an Instagram handle. Most of them want a website URL. It is a basic credibility signal that the professional world still uses.
A realistic starting point for most Kent operators.
Here is what I would actually suggest for most people I talk to, assuming a modest starting budget and a business that is service or product-based in some combination.
First fortnight: register a .co.uk domain, set up a Google Business Profile (free, and more powerful than most people realise for local search), and build a simple five-page website. Not a complicated one — a homepage that explains what you do and who for, a services or products page, an about page with a photo of you, a contact page with a phone number and a form, and a reviews or testimonials page once you have a few. That is it. Something like this from me typically runs to a few hundred pounds for a clean, fast, mobile-first build. Alternatively, if you are confident with technology, Squarespace or Webflow can get you there for around £15–20 a month without needing a developer.
Simultaneously: set up Instagram if your business suits it, link your website in the bio, and start posting. The Instagram builds trust and personality; the website captures the people who are ready to act. They do different jobs. Both matter eventually. Which one matters first depends on your business type.
One thing I always check before giving an opinion.
Before I tell anyone which direction to go, I ask them to Google three or four of their nearest competitors. Not to copy them — just to see where competitors are getting traction. If every successful competitor in your niche has a strong website and is ranking for local search terms, that tells you something. If they are all running thriving Instagram accounts with 10,000 followers and minimal web presence, that tells you something different.
Your market has already voted. The businesses that have lasted three or four years in your sector are doing something right. I am not saying copy them exactly, but understanding where they put their effort and where they are getting results is one of the fastest ways to work out where you should start. That kind of competitive audit takes about forty minutes and it is almost always worth doing before you spend anything.
The question under the question.
Honestly, when people ask me "Instagram or website first?", they are often really asking something else: "I am nervous about this, and I want permission to start with the thing that feels more manageable." Which I understand completely. Starting a business is daunting, and Instagram feels lower-stakes because you can delete a post. A website feels permanent.
But the answer has to come from where your customers are, not from what feels comfortable to build. That is the only honest way to look at it. If the answer is a website first and that feels overwhelming, then that is exactly the kind of thing I can help with — either by building it for you, or by walking you through what it actually needs to contain so it is not the 47-page monster you are imagining. It rarely needs to be.