Do I need a website if I have Instagram? When it pays off for a business in Tenerife

It depends on how your business sells. If you sell something cheap and impulse-driven to local customers who already know you, and you can keep up with the messages you get, Instagram is enough for now, as long as you register your domain in your name. If you sell services or expensive products, work with bookings, get searched for on Google or serve tourists, you do need a website, because when someone searches Google for what you do, Google mostly shows them Google Maps listings and websites, and that person ends up calling whoever appears.

You run a business in Tenerife, with Instagram, WhatsApp and a Google Maps listing, and customers come in. Every so often someone asks about your website and you give the same answer: you don't need one, you've got Instagram.

You might be right. You might also be losing customers you never even see. Whoever searches Google for what you do and finds another business's website first ends up messaging that business instead.

We build websites, so the easy answer would be “yes, you always need one”. The answer depends on how your business sells, and some businesses can get by on social media today. We'll tell you which ones, and in which cases having only Instagram is already costing you customers.

The underlying difference: who each channel depends on

Before we talk about types of business, there's one difference worth being clear about.

Having your business only on Instagram is like renting a unit in someone else's shopping centre. It works for you as long as the landlord decides people should walk past your door. If the algorithm (the formula Instagram uses to decide which posts it shows and to whom) changes one day, your reach drops and there's little you can do. And if your account gets blocked by mistake or stolen, you lose your posts, your followers and your contact channel in one go.

Your website is more like a unit you own. The domain (your address on the internet, such as yourbusiness.com) is your business's address, not a profile on someone else's platform; you decide what you say and how you say it, and the website stays there even if a social network changes its rules.

With that clear, let's get practical.

When Instagram is enough (for now)

Some businesses can run without a website today. It usually happens when all of these are true at once:

• You sell something cheap and impulse-driven: someone sees it, likes it, messages you and buys it.
• Your customer is local and already knows you, or comes by word of mouth.
• Messages come in at a pace you can handle and you're good at answering them.
• You've just started and you're still testing whether the idea works.

If that sounds like you, there's no need to spend money on a website tomorrow. Do just two things: register your domain in your name, which costs a few euros a year and stops someone else taking it, and keep your customers' contact details outside Instagram, in your phone contacts or a spreadsheet. The day the account fails, you'll be glad you did.

When Instagram is costing you customers

As soon as your business steps outside that picture, things change. These are the clearest signs.

People search for you on Google and you're not there

When someone needs a plumber, a dental clinic, a renovation company or a restaurant for Saturday night, they usually open Google and type “renovations Tenerife” or “restaurant La Laguna”. Google mostly shows them Google Maps listings and websites. With your Google Maps listing you can appear on the map, but the results underneath are websites, and if you don't have one, that spot goes to another business. On top of that, someone who sees your listing and has doubts looks for a link to your website to find out more, and if they can't find it, they may well move on to the next listing.

You sell services or expensive products

Few people commission an €8,000 renovation, hire a lawyer or pay for a €600 treatment after a single direct message. Before they call, they look you up: they want to know who you are, what you've done and what other customers think of you. A well-made website answers all of that at any hour, including three in the morning, when that person is comparing options from the sofa, and it explains it better than a profile designed to show photos and short videos.

You spend all day answering the same questions

Prices, opening hours, whether you have such-and-such, where you are, whether you take bookings. Every message takes a bit of your time. A website with that information in plain sight answers those questions for you and leaves WhatsApp for what matters, which is closing the sale or the appointment.

You manage bookings or appointments by hand

If your diary lives in a chat, you lose hours coordinating, and some customers get tired of waiting for a reply. With a booking form on your website, or a link to the appointment tool you already use, requests reach you neatly organised, even while you're asleep.

You're in Tenerife and your customer speaks English

Here Tenerife has something that sets it apart, and you can put numbers on it. According to the report “Situación turística de Tenerife 2025” by Turismo de Tenerife, 6,634,233 tourists living abroad arrived in Tenerife in 2025, 87.7% of those who came from outside the Canary Islands, and 2,768,035 of them came from the United Kingdom. The report uses data from FRONTUR, the survey by ISTAC (the Canary Islands Statistics Institute) that counts the tourists arriving on each island.

A British tourist staying in Costa Adeje who wants dinner types “best restaurant Costa Adeje” into Google. If all you have is a Spanish-language profile, they're unlikely to find you. A website in Spanish and English gives you a page that answers that search and tells them in their own language what you offer, what it costs and how to book.

Your competitors already have websites

When customers compare, and they nearly always do, the business with a clear website looks more serious and more trustworthy than the one with just a profile, even if you're the better of the two.

Instagram and your website share the work

You don't have to choose between them: Instagram and a website complement each other because they do different jobs. Instagram is for being discovered, showing your day-to-day and building a relationship with your audience. The website is for being found when people search for you, explaining properly what you do, building trust and getting the customer to do something concrete: call, book or ask for a quote.

Many customers follow this path: they see you on Instagram, open your profile, tap the link in your bio (the introduction text on your profile), land on your website, understand what you offer and get in touch. If there's nothing behind that link, or the page is slow to load, the path breaks right before the sale. According to Google (2016), 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Link-in-bio pages, the ones that gather several buttons on a single screen, work as a shortcut. Even so, they explain little about your business, they're designed for people who already follow you and they belong to another platform, so it's worth having a website of your own behind them.

The minimum website a local business needs

The good news is that you don't need much. For many businesses on the island, a landing page, which is a single-page website, covers almost everything above if it includes:

• What you do and for whom, in two sentences anyone understands straight away.
• Real photos of your premises, your team and your work, instead of stock photos downloaded from the internet.
• Your services or your menu, with prices if your sector allows it.
• How to get in touch: WhatsApp button, phone, address with a map and opening hours.
• Reviews from real customers.
• Spanish and English, if your customers need it.
• Fast loading on mobile, because that's where people will see it.
• A structure Google understands, so it knows what you do and in which town, and shows you when someone searches for it.

What you can leave for later: complicated animations, a blog if you'll be short of time to write it, and an online shop, which only makes sense if you sell online.

Before you order one, ask whether the website is custom-built or based on a template, how long it takes to load on mobile and what is done so that Google understands what you do and where. We go into more detail in what usually goes wrong in website design and how to get it right.

How we do it at Zelerix

Zelerix is a web design studio in Tenerife that also does local SEO, meaning the work that gets you found on Google in your area. If your business runs on Instagram and WhatsApp and you want a base of your own without taking on a huge project, this is what we offer:

• A €450 landing page, IGIC included (the Canary Islands' tax in place of VAT). We code it from scratch, with no templates or WordPress, so it loads fast on mobile and Google understands what you do and where. It includes custom design, two languages, domain, hosting (the space where the website is stored so it can be seen on the internet), security certificate (the one that makes the address start with https so the browser treats the connection as secure), the basic legal pages (legal notice, privacy and cookies), a form, a WhatsApp button or both, one round of revisions and 2 months of maintenance.
• A free demo before you pay. We build a demo of your website for you to see on your phone. If you like it, we finish it, and if you'd rather leave it there, you owe us nothing.
• Delivery in 3-5 working days, from the moment we have your text and photos.
• The website is yours. The code is yours from delivery. We register, renew and manage the domain ourselves, so you don't have to worry about it, and if you ever leave, we transfer it to you. If you'd rather pay in instalments, it's 6 to 12 payments with a 40% surcharge on the price of the website, and the code becomes yours once you've finished paying.
• Maintenance with no minimum term. After the 2 included months, it costs €19 a month or €180 a year and includes hosting, domain renewal, backups and small changes, such as text or photos. Bigger changes, such as a new section or page, are quoted separately at €40 an hour, before we start. If you ever cancel, we hand you the website so you can host it wherever you like.

If your business needs more than one page, the corporate website, with up to 5 pages, costs €900. If you also want to work on showing up on Google in your area, the corporate + SEO pack costs €1,150 and includes the SEO setup (the initial groundwork so Google understands what you do and where) and 2 months of SEO; after that, SEO continues at €200 a month until you cancel. We compare it all in how much a website costs in 2026.

The person who designs and codes your website is the person who answers when you write to us. If your business is in Tenerife, we come to see you, and with the rest of the Canary Islands and Spain we work remotely, by WhatsApp, phone, email or video call. We've built websites for a hair salon, a tattoo studio, a restaurant in La Laguna and a demolition company on the island, and for a patisserie and a restaurant in Mataró; you can see them in our website portfolio. With the new website we built for them, Demoliciones Tenerife reached 4th place on Google for “demoliciones tenerife” in under 4 months (September 2026), ahead of companies with more than 30 years in the sector, as we explain in the Demoliciones Tenerife case study.

You keep using Instagram just as you do now. The difference is that the link in your bio leads to a page that explains what you do and makes it easy to message you or book, and when someone searches for your business on Google, they have somewhere to find you.

If you'd like to know which part of the website you'd need to prepare and which part we handle, we explain it in building your website yourself or hiring someone.

In short

Do you need a website if you already have Instagram? If you sell cheap, impulse-driven products to local customers and you can keep up with the messages, you can still wait: register your domain and carry on. If you sell services or expensive products, manage bookings, your customers search for you on Google or speak English, you need one now, because every week without a website, whoever searches for you on Google ends up finding another business.

Instagram is for being discovered, and your website is for being found and hired. And the website is yours.

If you'd like to know the minimum website your business needs and what it would cost, tell us what you do. We'll give you a clear answer, and if you don't need one yet, we'll tell you that too.