An Instagram profile and a website do two different jobs.

What a profile does that a website does not

A profile shows the work while it is being done, and shows it to people who were not looking for you.

The window you redressed this morning, tonight’s dish, a reply to a comment: that material is worth something because it is recent, and stops being worth anything the moment it is not. A website does not do that job. Run as a noticeboard it ages badly, and an expired offer sitting on the home page says the wrong thing about you.

The profile also holds the conversation: direct messages, comments, the people who recognise you in the street. That is real work and it belongs there. A conversation cannot be looked up. Somebody who finds you today will not scroll back through a season of stories to learn what a service costs or whether you are open on Monday.

What a website does that a profile does not

A website is a fixed address: the same facts, always in the same place, written to be read by a person and by a machine.

Hours, prices, the address and the way to book sit in one place and are corrected once. Change the closing day on the page and from then on there is one version of it. On a profile the same fact lives in a short bio, an old post and an expired story, and the reader stops at whichever one they meet first.

This counts for more when the reader is not local. Somebody arriving from Zurich, or from outside Switzerland, cannot ask a neighbour whether you are open in mid-August. They check the page, and the page either answers or it does not.

A search engine and a map listing read text, not carousels. If your price list exists only inside an image, a search engine has nothing to read. Written as text on a page it becomes readable, which is a claim about legibility and not about where you appear in a set of results.

Who the address belongs to

An account is hosted: its rules, its limits and its existence belong to somebody else.

A profile can be suspended by an automated check, lost with a phone, or locked after an unrecognised login. It can also be tied to a mailbox that belonged to somebody who no longer works with you: that one is not an accident, it is how the account was opened. While that is being sorted out the business carries on, but the only public address it had does not answer.

This is not common, and we are not going to describe it as though it were.

A website sits on a domain, and if that domain is registered in your business’s name the address keeps existing when you change supplier. None of this is a reason to leave Instagram: the profile keeps doing its job, and for many businesses it does it well. It is a reason not to let it be the only place your business exists.