Do you need a website as a content creator? Yes, once you are taking inquiries — but almost certainly not the kind of website you are picturing. You do not need seven pages, a blog and a shop. You need one page, at an address you own, that answers a buyer's questions in under a minute. Your link in bio is not that page and was never built to be. Keep both. They do different jobs, and the day you stop asking each one to do the other's job, your business front gets much easier to run.
What a link in bio is actually for
A link in bio is a traffic router. Someone who already likes you taps it and gets sent somewhere: the new video, the shop, the newsletter. That is a real job, and it is worth doing well.
Instagram made that job smaller. As Social Media Today reported on April 18, 2023, Instagram rolled out the ability to add up to five links directly in a profile bio, in an order you choose. The original reason most creators installed a link-in-bio tool — the platform allowed exactly one link — is largely gone. The tools still offer design and click data. They just have to earn their place on something other than solving a limit that no longer exists.
Four things a link in bio cannot do
**It cannot make your case.** A column of buttons tells a brand manager nothing about what you make, who you make it for, or what working with you is like. Buttons are navigation. A case is writing, selected work and honest numbers.
**It cannot hold work a stranger can browse.** Someone deciding whether to pay you wants ten strong frames in ten seconds, not a tap out to another app and a scroll through a feed where your work sits between your dog and your coffee.
**It is not an address you own.** That page lives on someone else's domain, under someone else's terms, with their name in the URL. A domain you register is yours whatever happens to the tool, its pricing or its owners.
**It is usually not what comes up when someone searches your name.** Test this right now. Open a private browser window and search your professional name the way a stranger would type it. Whatever loads first is your real front door, whether you built it or not.
The line where a website stops being optional
Skip the vibes and run three checks.
1. Have you sent a media kit to anyone in the last ninety days?
2. Has a brand, producer, photographer or fellow creator asked where they can see more of your work?
3. If your largest account vanished tomorrow morning, would someone who wanted to hire you still have a way to reach you?
One yes and you are past the line. Before that, your bio link is genuinely enough and building a site is procrastination dressed as work. After it, every inquiry is arriving at a page that cannot answer the questions being asked of it.
Why the advice on this question is so bad
On October 29, 2026 we ran the search a creator would actually run — link in bio versus a website — and read the first page of results. Every single one was published by a company selling one of the two things being compared: link-in-bio tools on one side, website builders and web studios on the other. The answer you get depends entirely on whose page you landed on.
The most balanced of them, a guide published by the web studio Linke, gets the shape right. It says plainly that a link-in-bio page and a website are not rivals and that most creators end up with both. What it does not give you — and neither does anything else on that page of results — is a threshold, a page spec, or a single number.
So here is the part they leave out.
What actually goes on the page
One page. Five blocks, in this order, because this is the order a buyer's questions arrive in.
**A line that says what you are.** Not a tagline. A sentence a stranger could repeat to their boss. Coastal lifestyle and swim creator in San Diego, shooting on location year round.
**Six to twelve images, chosen not collected.** Your best work, not your most recent. Mixed enough to show range, consistent enough to show a point of view. If two images do the same job, cut one.
**What you offer, in their words.** Content packages, usage, appearances, travel. You do not have to publish prices to name what you sell — and how you talk about rates is a separate skill worth building.
**Proof that is actually yours.** Brands you have worked with, publications, a real number or two you can stand behind. Never a number you cannot show in your own analytics.
**One way to inquire, that reaches you.** A short form or a business email you read. Not a DM. The whole point is to get the conversation out of a feed and into a thread you can reply to properly and follow up on.
That is it. No blog you will not maintain. No shop with nothing in it. A page that loads fast on a phone and reads clean on a laptop, because half your visitors will be on each.
How this fits with everything else you have
Your bio link stays. It keeps routing fans to whatever is new, and it adds one quiet button that says Work with me, pointing at the page. Your fan presence and your business presence stay separate on purpose. Your media kit is the document you send when someone asks; the page is what they find when they do not ask and go looking instead.
Three surfaces, one job each. Bio link routes. Page makes the case. Kit closes.
Build it this week
Register a domain with your working name on it, even if it only forwards to your bio link for now. Write the one-line description before you touch a template; everything else is easier once that sentence exists. Pull the images and cut the weak ones. Put the inquiry form on the same page, not a separate contact tab nobody clicks. Then search your own name again in a week and see what moved.
If you would rather not build it yourself, that is what Coastal Beauties does — creator websites, media kits and inquiry setup, done for you, built around the page described above.
And wherever your page lives, you can also claim a free profile in the Coastal Beauties creator directory so there is one more place carrying your name, your work and a way to reach you.
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