Do you need a website if your cafe has Instagram?

Every second cafe owner asks some version of this to their accountant, their web-agency cousin, or Google itself: I've got a few thousand followers on Instagram, so why do I need a website too? It's a fair question. Instagram is free, you already know how to use it, and your regulars find you there every day.

The honest answer isn't "yes, obviously," and it isn't "no, Instagram is enough" either. It comes down to what Instagram's own numbers say about who's actually seeing your posts — and in 2026, Instagram makes that painfully easy to check.

Why this question keeps coming up

A GoDaddy-commissioned Australian survey found 59% of Australian small businesses don't have a website at all, rising to 65% in regional areas — with cost, time, and "we're too small for that" cited as the main reasons. Hospitality is a big chunk of that number. It's not laziness, either: research from the National Retail Association found only 25% of Australian SMEs proactively engage on social media, and just 36% use SEO effectively. Most venues aren't nailing either channel, let alone deciding between them.

That's the real stakes. This isn't website versus Instagram in the abstract — it's "where do I put my limited time," and Instagram wins that argument by default because it's already open on your phone.

The reach split Instagram won't let you ignore

Since March 2026, Instagram has opened its Insights panel — including the Connected Reach versus Unconnected Reach breakdown — to every public account, not just business profiles. Connected reach is people who already follow you, or who follow someone who's engaged with your post. Unconnected reach is everyone else: people the algorithm chose to show your content to, cold.

Instagram's own head, Adam Mosseri, has explained the mechanics behind that split plainly: likes matter slightly more for connected content, keeping the audience you already have engaged, while sends matter slightly more for unconnected content, getting shown to people who've never heard of you. The "new customer" half of Instagram runs largely on whether a stranger shares your post to a friend — not on how many locals double-tap your croissant photo.

Open your own Insights and look at that split. For most cafe accounts, unconnected reach is a small, unreliable sliver next to connected reach. You're mostly just talking to people who already know you exist. That's a loyalty channel, not a discovery channel — and loyalty is worth having, but it's not the same job as reaching someone who's never set foot in your venue.

Meanwhile, someone searching "brunch Fitzroy" or "cafe open now near me" is doing that on Google, not Instagram. By most local-search estimates, just over six in ten consumers still find and decide on a restaurant through Google Search or Maps, ahead of Yelp or social apps. To be fair, social media isn't irrelevant to that process — most people checking out a local business also glance at social media somewhere along the way, and among 18 to 24 year-olds specifically, Instagram and TikTok edge out Google Search for local discovery by a narrow margin. But even in the most Instagram-friendly age group, Google is running a close second, not being ignored — and once someone does search on Google, they move fast: the vast majority of people who do a local mobile search go on to visit or call the business within 24 hours. Google's AI-powered search is changing that picture further, and it's worth understanding before you decide Google isn't your problem.

The search feature almost nobody uses properly

Here's the other half of the unconnected-reach problem: Instagram does have a real search feature, and it increasingly works like a keyword search engine — it reads your captions, not just your hashtags, to decide who to surface your content to. Instagram's head has publicly said hashtags don't boost reach anymore; they just categorise content for the algorithm to sort. The platform also cut the hashtag limit from 30 per post down to 5, which only makes sense if hashtags were never meant to carry the weight most cafes still put on them.

Which means the caption that says "vibes ✨🌿 #cafe #brunch #foodie #instagood" is invisible to the one Instagram feature that behaves like a search engine. The caption that says "New winter menu at our Preston cafe — house-made ricotta gnocchi, wood-fired sourdough, proper flat whites" is the one that shows up when someone searches for exactly that. Most venues are writing the first caption. Almost none are writing the second.

That's functionally SEO, whether you call it that or not — keyword-rich copy so a search feature can match intent to content. A website just gives you far more surface area to do the same thing properly: real page titles, real headings, a menu Google can actually read. Your hours, address, and menu living only in an Instagram bio and old captions aren't reliably readable by Google the way the same facts are on a website. A page titled "Opening hours" with real, structured text is something Google can pull straight into a search result. A fact buried three grid posts deep in your feed usually isn't.

When the algorithm turns against you

This part isn't hypothetical, and it isn't an overseas horror story you can wave off as "that won't happen to me." In July 2025, Kellie Johnson — founder of the Australian heat-pack business Kosi — had her Instagram account suspended over an alleged child-safety policy violation she says never happened. Her revenue reportedly more than halved, a hit reported at around $80,000. Around the same time, Rochelle Marinato, an Australian pilates-equipment supplier, had her account suspended after posting a video of dogs looking out a window. Her revenue reportedly dropped 75%, a loss cited at around $50,000.

Neither of these was a one-off. From late May 2025, Instagram began mass-suspending accounts with little explanation, prompting a Change.org petition over Meta's lack of human customer support that gathered close to 26,000 signatures. A follow-up investigation found that even paying for Meta Verified support did little to help affected users get their accounts back.

And this isn't just aggrieved business owners talking. The ACCC's own Digital Platforms Services Inquiry report, released in June 2025, explicitly flags the risk: small businesses that depend on platforms like Instagram and Facebook can lose their means of reaching customers entirely if their account is deactivated, with no reliable process to dispute it. That's Australia's own competition regulator, on the record, describing exactly the risk a cafe running solely on Instagram is carrying.

A website you own doesn't have this failure mode. Nobody can suspend your domain because an algorithm flagged the wrong thing.

What Instagram still does better

None of this makes Instagram useless, and a post that pretends otherwise isn't being straight with you. Instagram is still the best tool for visual discovery — people scroll through food photos and decide where to eat that way, and no website homepage replicates that browsing behaviour. Stories are genuinely suited to same-day, unpolished moments — "sold out of the lamb ragu, kitchen's doing risotto instead" or "live music from 7pm tonight" — in a way a static website page was never built for. DM-based bookings work fine for an audience that already follows you and already trusts you.

If you're a market stall or a food truck three months into existence, running on Instagram alone for a while is a genuinely reasonable call. You don't need a website before you need customers. That's not a knock on Instagram — it's just not the same job as "someone who's never heard of you searches for a cafe in your suburb and finds you."

Skip the advice that ignores all this

A lot of advice cafe owners get is some version of "just post more" or "the algorithm doesn't matter, keep grinding, it'll come." Ignore it. The algorithm is the entire mechanism deciding whether a stranger ever sees your venue — insisting it doesn't matter, while never once checking your own Connected versus Unconnected reach split, is how you end up two years deep talking to the same 400 people.

Same goes for hashtag-stuffing captions to "beat the algorithm." Instagram has told you directly that hashtags categorise, they don't boost, and it cut the cap to 5 for a reason. Chasing reach with vibes-only captions and thirty tags is optimising for a mechanism that doesn't exist anymore.

And don't treat "Instagram is enough" as a decision made once, in year one, and never revisited. What's true for a market stall isn't true once you've got a fixed lease, a full-time chef, and a Tuesday-to-Sunday roster to fill. The synthesis is the one Instagram's own reach split is already showing you: it's genuinely good at reaching people who already know you, and structurally weaker at reaching people who don't — yet. A website does the other half of that job — it's what shows up when someone searches cold, it's what survives an algorithm change or a wrongful suspension, and it's the one place your hours, menu, and address are always exactly right. You don't have to pick one: keep posting to Instagram for your regulars and your daily specials — that's genuinely working for you — and add a website for the part of the funnel Instagram can't structurally cover, instead of hoping unconnected reach eventually saves you.

The honest pitch

FastPage builds that second half specifically for cafes, restaurants, and bars — menu, hours, a booking form, and Google visibility, live in minutes, without needing to become a web developer on top of running a kitchen. If you want to see what that actually looks like for your venue, sign up and build one.