Do artists still need a website?

The honest answer is that Instagram is doing most of the work for most artists, and that this is exactly why the site matters.

What the feed is bad at

A feed is reverse chronological and fragmented. It shows the most recent thing first, mixed in with process shots, reposts and life. That is fine for keeping an audience warm and terrible for showing a body of work.

Someone deciding whether to commission you, show you or buy from you wants to see a series in the order you intended, at a size where the work reads. A grid cannot do that.

You do not own the account

Accounts get locked, hacked and mistakenly flagged, and there is frequently no person to appeal to. Artists lose years of work and every contact in one afternoon.

That is not an argument for abandoning the platform. It is an argument for not letting it be the only place you exist.

Search cannot see inside the app

If someone hears your name and searches it, what they find is decided almost entirely by whether you have a site. Everything inside the app is largely invisible to search, and it is not where a gallery or a commissioner will look first.

For an artist this matters mostly for your own name and your medium in your city. Those are small searches with high intent, which is the best kind to win.

What it actually needs

Very little, and less than most artists think.

The work, large, in an order you chose. A short statement written the way you would explain it out loud rather than in gallery language. A way to contact you that is not a form nobody checks. Where the work can be seen or bought. That is a complete artist site, and anything else is usually there to fill space.

The mistake worth avoiding

Do not build something so elaborate that updating it is a project. The most common failure is not an ugly site. It is a beautiful one that still shows work from three years ago because adding to it is a chore.

If you will not update it, it is worse than nothing, because it tells people you stopped.