Is a Website Still Worth It When Maps, Instagram and WhatsApp Do the Work?
You can find a plumber, buy a dress and pay for a fridge without opening a single website. So are websites still worth having? Here’s what the apps took, and what they left behind.
Kanyi Mwangi
Think about the last time you needed something from a business you didn’t know.
Maybe a plumber. You searched on Google, and a map came up with a few names, their star ratings and a call button. You read two reviews and tapped call. You never opened a website.
Maybe a dress. You saw it on Instagram, sent a message asking for your size, paid with M-Pesa and waited for the rider. You never opened a website either.
Maybe a second-hand fridge. You found it on Jiji, compared three listings and called the seller.
Each of those purchases went through several apps, and each app did one job well. Finding. Showing. Talking. Paying. None of them needed the business to have a website.
That’s worth understanding properly, because it didn’t start out this way.
When one place did everything
Go back to the late 1990s in the United States and Europe, when businesses first started putting themselves online. There were no maps with reviews, no Instagram and no WhatsApp. If a business wanted to exist online, it built a website, and that website had to do every job at once.
It was the listing that told people where the business was and when it opened. It was the catalogue that showed what it sold. It was the contact point, with a phone number and an enquiry form. Sometimes it was the shop, with an order form. And it carried the proof, in the form of a page of testimonials.
One place, every job. Most businesses here never went through that stage. Many met the apps first, and one study found that 92% of Kenyan micro-entrepreneurs use social or messaging apps to run their business. But knowing that websites once did everything explains what happened next.
Then each job got its own app
Over the following twenty years, every job the website did was picked up by a service built only for that job.
| The job | What the website used to do | Who does it now |
|---|---|---|
| Being listed | An address and opening hours on a contact page | Google Maps and your Google Business Profile |
| Showing your work | A gallery page | Instagram and TikTok |
| Answering questions | An enquiry form | |
| Proof | A testimonials page | Google reviews and comments on your posts |
| Selling stock | An order form | Jiji, Jumia, and shops inside the apps |
| Taking payment | Rarely did, here | M-Pesa |
Each of these does its single job better than an old all-purpose website did. A map with reviews and a call button is faster than a contact page. A chat is friendlier than a form.
This has happened before
Specialists taking jobs from a general-purpose tool is an old pattern.
The Yellow Pages are a good example. As the story goes, the first one was printed in 1883 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on yellow paper because the printer ran out of white. For about a century after that, the thick book of business listings was how people in many countries found a plumber. Search engines and maps took that job, and the printed directories shrank year after year.
Newspapers went through the same thing. In the United States in the 2000s, the average local newspaper got around 40% of its revenue from classified ads. Then free listing sites like Craigslist took those ads. Researchers estimated that buyers of classified ads saved $5 billion between 2000 and 2007, money that newspapers would otherwise have earned.
In both cases, one place used to do a job alongside many others, and a service that did only that job took it away.
Even Google stopped building small-business websites
For years, Google let businesses create a simple free website straight from their Business Profile. In 2024 it switched them off. Those sites began redirecting to the business’s Google profile in March, and stopped working entirely on June 10, 2024. The same year, Google also removed the chat feature from Business Profiles.
There are two ways to read this, and both are true.
One reading: Google decided the profile itself was enough. For a business that only needs to be found on a map and called, it may be.
The other: even Google switches off features businesses rely on, with a few months’ notice. Anyone who had built their online presence on those free sites had to start again.
What no app does
Look again at the table. Each app holds one piece of your business, and each piece is shaped by that app’s rules.
Your Instagram shows your work in the format Instagram allows. Your Google profile has the fields Google decided on. Your Jiji listing looks like every other Jiji listing. Your WhatsApp holds conversations, one at a time.
None of them holds the whole picture: what you do, who it’s for, what it costs, how it works, what others have said, and how to start, all in one place, arranged the way you choose. A customer who wants that has to collect it from four apps, and most won’t.
That’s the job no specialist took, because no specialist is built for it. It’s also the one place every app can point to. Your Google profile has a space for a website link. So does your Instagram bio.
When the apps are enough
For some businesses, the pieces are enough. If customers find you on a map, call, and that’s the whole sale, a well-kept Google profile may do everything you need. If your buyers already know exactly what they want and only need a price, a chat may be all it takes.
The website matters most when a customer needs the whole picture before deciding, and when gathering it from four apps would lose them on the way.
One more thing about those apps
Look at the table one last time. Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, Jiji, Jumia, M-Pesa.
Every one of them has a website.
Google has google.com. Jiji has jiji.co.ke. Even the services built to help businesses sell on WhatsApp without a website have websites of their own, with pages explaining what they do, what they cost and how to get started.
The best example is Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Between them, those three apps reach billions of people every day. If any company could explain itself without a website, it’s this one.
Yet when Meta wants to explain what Instagram is, it does it on its own website, at meta.com/instagram. Facebook gets a page at meta.com/facebook-app. WhatsApp gets one too. Each page says what the app is for, links to its help centre and business tools, and sits alongside everything else Meta offers.
The company that runs the apps businesses are told are enough still puts the whole picture of what it offers on a website.
The website lost most of its jobs to apps that do them better. What it kept is the one job none of them is built for: being the whole of your business, in one place, on your terms.