Nilay Patel from The Verge recently raised a provocative question in an interview with Microsoft’s Kevin Scott: “why would anybody start a website?”
[If we were starting The Verge] in 2025, I think, we would start a TikTok. I’ve asked people, “Why would anyone start a website now?” And the answer almost universally is to do e-commerce. It’s to do transactions outside of platform rules or platform taxes. It’s to send people somewhere else to validate that you are a commercial entity of some kind, and then do a transaction, and that is the point of the web.
Patel’s argument boils down to this: build inside the walled gardens, then tack on a website just to take money. That might make sense in media, where scale and distribution drive everything. But outside that world — in healthcare, finance, software, education, even independent creators — the web plays a much bigger, more varied role.
Far from being just a checkout counter, a website is the one place where a business can fully define who they are, how they operate, and how they grow.
What the Web Actually Does for Business
While I think it’s reductive and a little sad to think of the web as just a transaction platform, I do agree with this reason to have a website: “to send people somewhere else to validate that you are a commercial entity of some kind*.”*
That’s right! But the value of that can be tremendous for a business at any stage. A good website validates who you are, but more than that it shows people what you’re about.
Platforms do offer real benefits: reach, simplicity, built-in audiences. To the extent platforms work for business, they do the best job serving businesses whose customer base and offerings are simple — one brand, one offer, one target customer.
Meanwhile, at B&L we’ve worked with some clients whose audiences include multiple different customer groups — for example, IT startups who need to speak to both developers and IT buyers, or healthcare companies serving patients, doctors, and insurance companies.
On top of content management challenges, companies often need more advanced data, personalization, or operations tools than they can get from platforms. You can’t optimize a TikTok page for lead generation the way you can optimize a website. You can’t A/B test your Instagram bio the way you can test landing pages.
Platforms are great for reach, but websites are much better for depth.
A website can be a great transaction medium, but that’s in part because of its strength as a relationship medium, letting businesses communicate more clearly and form stronger bonds with their own specific audiences.
‘Cheap’ is often expensive
In fairness, websites can indeed be complicated and expensive — in fact, they often are, even when you use platforms designed to make them easy and cheap.
In my experience, businesses with website problems fall into two buckets:
- Folks spending way too little on their websites and not getting enough value
- Folks spending way too much on their websites and not getting enough value
The first group are folks — in fairness, usually small businesses — who treat their website like a digital business card, something they need to have but don’t really invest in optimizing. In our view, they’re leaving money on the table because they’re not thinking strategically about how their web presence could drive business outcomes. The costs are lower, but so are the benefits.
Within the “too much” camp are companies who got sold on expensive custom builds or complex platforms without clear strategy, but also ones who’ve gone through a series of cheap one-off fixes or additions, also without a clear strategy. Whether these setups start out cheap or expensive, they tend to end up more expensive than intended over time.
But the ‘too little’ camp faces similar issues when they try to scale. We’ve worked with companies who started on site builders that worked fine with a single developer or marketer, but became bottlenecks as they scaled and added more go-to-market staff. What seemed like a smart, cost-effective choice suddenly became a constraint on growth.
The limitations these companies run up against aren’t just aesthetic - though the ‘boxy’ templates that can’t be customized certainly don’t help with brand differentiation. These folks also hit walls with content organization (try building a proper mega menu), optimization capabilities (limited analytics, no A/B testing), and basic scaling needs (page limits, no localization support).
Then, all of a sudden, you’re facing an expensive migration at exactly the wrong time - when you’re growing fast and need to focus on other priorities.
Getting It Right
The web’s unique advantages—control, customization, universal accessibility—only matter if you approach them strategically. That means understanding not just what’s technically possible, but what actually drives business results for your specific situation.
Platforms aren’t just one-size-fits-all experiences - they’re also one-size-fits-all strategies. They work well if your business model, audience, and growth plan happen to match their assumptions. But most businesses need more flexibility in how they approach their market.
Take one of our clients who needed to scale from a day-one Webflow build as their company grew. Rather than jumping to the latest technology, we focused on creating ‘systems, structure, and speed to keep up with growth—without adding overhead.’ As a result, as their designer put it, we made the process of building and updating pages ‘fun’ by creating templates and reusable components that let their team ‘move fast without sacrificing quality.’
This client didn’t need the most complex solution—they needed the right solution for their growth stage and team structure. We helped them launch everything from customer testimonial pages to blog and use case pages — all optimized for SEO and conversion — but more importantly, we helped them build a system that could evolve with their business.
The businesses that get real value from their web presence aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most money. They’re the ones investing the right amount in the right things at the right time, with a strategy that can scale as they grow.
So why would anyone start a website in 2025? Because it’s still the only place where you can build exactly what your business needs, exactly how your customers need to experience it. The question isn’t whether you need that kind of control—it’s whether you’re using it wisely.
Want to explore how to approach your web presence more strategically? Let’s talk.