I’ve heard many small business owners compain about Instagram blocking or suspending their accounts recently.

Losing access to your sales channel on Instagram can be very frustrating even if it’s just for a few hours or days.

That’s why you need to back up your Instagram sales with a website. Even if the majority of your customers come from social networks, your Instagram or Facebook account doesn’t really belong to you, it belongs to the social network. An influx of comments, an audacious image you’ve posted, a flow of fake abuse reports or just a human/bot error may lead your Instagram account to suspension.

This is not the case with owning a website.

Just a few benefits of owning a website are:

1.

You own all content, database, and files related to your website.

2.

You can store as many site backup copies as you need, so you can always have your website re-built in case anything goes wrong.

3.

Even if you forget to renew your hosting subscription or domain name (they will send you a million reminders by the way), you still have your backups!

4.

You get some visitors from Google search. Search traffic may make up just a small share of your customers, but they are usually more motivated to buy because they know exactly what they’re looking for.

5.

And yes, there’re still people who prefer googling things to digging through social networks.

6.

Obviously, websites are better-structured than Instagram posts so it’s easier for your customers to find content/product they’re looking for.

7.

A website is a great storage space for static content like FAQs, knowledge bases, shipping&delivery info etc. All those questions that customers keep asking over and over again.

8.

Website stats are more transparent and you can measure them with multiple tools of your choice.

9.

There’re no moderator bots following every step you take. Your website/hosting account can only get suspended if you post some really offensive or illegal content or if your website got seriously hacked/infected.

So why would you even have to choose between Instagram and a website?

These two should go hand in hand, supporting and complementing each other.

There’re many cases where both your Instagram account and your website can be involved. For example, customers might use your website to find products (because it’s better-structured and you don’t have to filter by annoying hashtags) and then reach you via direct messages on Instagram (because it’s more personal).

Or you could use your website to point your Instagram customers to information like shipping&delivery, FAQs, or “get a quote” forms, which will save you a ton of time.