Do I need a website for my salon if I have Instagram and Fresha?

If your chairs are full and your Instagram is doing the work, this is a fair thing to ask. Plenty of salon owners have decided the answer is no, and they were not being lazy about it. They looked at what a website would cost them in time and money, looked at what they already had, and could not see the gap.

We build salon websites, so weigh what follows accordingly. We would still rather give you the narrow version that is true than the wide one that sells better.

What they genuinely do well

Instagram is the best shop window a salon has ever had. The work is visual, and a grid of before-and-afters says more in three seconds than any paragraph we could write for you. Stories fill a Tuesday afternoon that was going to sit empty. Your regulars already follow you, and reaching them costs nothing.

Fresha does the part nobody enjoys. Bookings, deposits, reminders, client history, the card machine. It takes the phone out of your hand while you have got someone’s colour developing. If somebody tells you to drop it, they have never stood behind a chair.

Between them they cover the two hardest jobs in a salon: showing the work, and taking the booking. A website replaces neither, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The one thing neither can do

Somebody in your town wants a balayage on Saturday. They have never heard of you. They open Google, or they ask ChatGPT, and they type the sort of thing people actually type. Salon near me. Best hairdresser in Guildford. Where to get a balayage.

What comes back is a set of pages. That is the shape of the answer in all of them. And the page that person opens next is either yours or somebody else’s.

Fresha gives you a page, and it is a decent page. It is also Fresha’s. It sits at Fresha’s address, it carries Fresha’s name above yours, and every other salon on Fresha is a tap away on the same screen. You are a tenant with a good window display. Instagram is the same arrangement with different furniture: a profile inside somebody else’s product, laid out their way, changed whenever they decide to change it.

None of that makes them bad. It makes them rented.

What your own page actually buys you

Three things, all of them small and dull, which is why nobody sells them properly.

• The address is yours. yoursalon.co.uk, with nobody else’s name in front of it.
• The page says what you want it to say. Your prices, your treatments, the parking round the back, the walk-ins you take on a Monday. Try fitting that into a booking profile.
• It does not move when somebody else changes their mind. If the feed changes, or a commission changes, the page you own is still sitting there.

We cannot tell you where Google will put it, and anyone who tells you they can is guessing. What we can tell you is that a page at your own address is something a search engine and an AI assistant are able to read, index and link to. A profile inside somebody else’s app mostly is not.

So, do you need one?

Not this week, if the chairs are full. That is the honest answer, and it costs us nothing to say it.

The version worth thinking about is smaller than "every business needs a website". It is this: when somebody who has never heard of you goes looking for a salon in your town, there ought to be something of yours for them to land on. Keep posting. Keep taking bookings on Fresha. Add the one thing that sits at your own address and belongs to you.

If you want to see what that looks like before you decide anything, put your salon’s name into our salon page and we will build one from your Google listing. It is free to look at, and if you walk away there is nothing to cancel.