With everything going on in the world currently, now more than ever, it is important to stay connected — in both personal and business relationships. Many of us are working from home and, in most cases, this means using more online resources to connect with our clients/customers or potential clients/leads.

A lot of people are asking the question “is a website still important in 2020?”. With the explosion of various social media platforms and Facebook business pages, it’s easy to lose sight of the value of a website. Yes, it’s true, you have Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, all these social media platforms that are definitely avenues for you to produce and distribute content to people. But your website will always be your home base to direct that traffic to and it is key to maintaining your business structure during these difficult times. So to answer the question — yes a website is still important in 2020, and perhaps even more so than ever before.

//Social Media vs. Website

Some people feel that the website is not as relevant as it was 10 years ago but I kind of disagree with that. The website really becomes your hub, your central location, your identity, who you are. Because ultimately, you totally control your website. You can change every aspect of it and you can control it to do whatever you want to do. On these social media platforms it’s great because you can reach people that are already on these platforms, however you do have limited capabilities of what you can do.

For example, on Instagram, you cannot post a link in the description of a picture. This is annoying, and it forces everybody to put the link in their bio. Same thing with Facebook, you have these pages but you are limited in what you can do.

You absolutely do need to use these platforms, these platforms are important because it’s so easy to reach people and everybody is now on social media. But I think the website becomes the hub and central location where the core of your business information is and is easy to reach. It is definitely still relevant because you can always refer back to your website from your social media, and from your website you can use a lot of different techniques to acquire leads or make sales.

Even with ecommerce, it is so simple today to make your own ecommerce website. There are all these platforms you can use that already have built in ecommerce you can configure like Shopify and SquareSpace. You don’t really manage them fully but it still gives you more flexibility than all these other social media platforms.

//Your Website is Your Hub

I think it’s really a matter of combining everything and being everywhere as much as you can on all these platforms, but use your website as your central location for the core of what you want to do, your goal and mission as a business. This is where you can distribute a lot of information from and then pass it on to the social media. There’s different techniques you can use to optimize that, but ultimately, I think its still important to have a website, be able to be there on the search engine, easy to reach and show the proper information in the format you want.

I think this is why websites are still relevant and they will be for a long time.

— Guillaume Bourdages
Vice President of Graphem Solutions