Linktree Is Not a Business Website: The Gaps

You have probably been told that a link in your bio is enough to get started. Set up the Instagram, add a link-in-bio page underneath it, and worry about a proper website later when there is money for it. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is handed out constantly to people opening their first business.

It was reasonable advice once. It is not reasonable now, and the reason has very little to do with web design.

A florist asked me a version of this on a call last week. Good feed, steady following, a bio link opening onto a stack of buttons, and a simple question: does she need anything else. The honest answer took most of the call, so let me give you the shorter version I wish I had led with.

The advice made sense in 2019. The platform has moved on since.

Link-in-bio tools exist because Instagram used to allow exactly one clickable link on a profile. One. If you wanted to send people to a shop, a booking page and a phone number, you could not, so a whole product category grew up to solve that single restriction.

Instagram removed the restriction. Profiles have been able to hold several links directly for a couple of years now, which means the original problem the tool solved is one the platform now solves itself, for nothing.

So the question is no longer "how do I fit more than one link in my bio". It is a different question entirely. What happens when someone who has never heard of you goes looking for your business, and the only thing standing where your website should be is a page of buttons?

Google does not count it as your website

This is the part that surprises people, so I want to be precise about it rather than hand-waving.

Google's own guidelines for representing your business are direct on the point. Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that "redirect or 'refer' users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business, including pages created on social media sites" ^[1]. The website field on your Google Business Profile is meant to hold something that represents your business, not a signpost pointing at other places your business happens to appear.

Google goes further in its policies for the links you attach to a profile. Those links must "lead to a dedicated landing page for your business", must be reachable by its crawlers, and explicitly cannot be social media sites, messaging links, app store links or link shorteners ^[2].

Now, the practical consequence. Your Google Business Profile is the single most valuable free asset most local firms have. Someone searches your business name, or searches "florist near me", and your listing appears with a Website button on it. That button is the highest-intent tap on the entire listing, because the person pressing it has already decided they are interested and now wants detail. Send them to a page of buttons and you have answered a question they did not ask. They wanted prices, or a booking form, or proof you have done this before. You gave them a menu of other apps.

There is a second cost, and it is slower and harder to see. Every visit that lands on a third-party page builds that third party's search authority, not yours. Three years of that and you still have nothing of your own to rank. A business website that has been quietly accumulating pages, reviews and local relevance since 2023 is in a completely different position to one that started this morning.

A page of links routes attention elsewhere. A website is where it lands.

You cannot put your own name on it

Ask the platform directly and you get a clear answer. Linktree's own help centre states plainly: "We don't offer the option to use a custom domain to replace the linktr.ee URL." Its suggested workaround is a redirect link, so that you can "direct people to your own website" ^[3].

Read that twice. The recommended way to get your own brand into the experience is to have a website and point at it.

This is not a small cosmetic issue. Your web address is the thing you print. It goes on the van, the sandwich board, the invoice, the wedding brochure, the sponsored jersey, the sign outside. Every one of those is a physical object with a shelf life measured in years, and every one of them will carry somebody else's brand name in front of yours. If you ever move, whether to a real site or to a different tool, those printed items keep sending people to an address you no longer control. I have written before about why a printed QR code should point at a domain you own, and the same logic applies with more force here, because at least a QR code can be regenerated. A tattoo of someone else's URL on ten thousand business cards cannot.

The same principle runs through the choice between a free subdomain and a domain of your own. You are not choosing a URL. You are choosing whether the address your customers memorise belongs to you.

What each one actually does

Job to be done	Link-in-bio page	Your own website
Address customers see	Platform brand plus your username	Your own domain
Google Business Profile website link	Third-party page, against Google's guidance	Exactly what the field is for
Title tag and meta description	Paid tier only	Yours to set on every page
Sell, book or take deposits	Routes out to other apps	Happens on your site
Cost to remove someone else's branding	Around €126 a year	Not a concept that exists

Every one of those rows is worth a moment, and I have covered the first two above. The others are below.

The pricing is worth a look, because it is not what people assume

Most owners believe the trade is free page versus expensive website. Check the numbers before you accept that.

Linktree publishes four tiers. Free is free. Starter is €4.50 a month billed annually, or €6 month to month. Pro is €10.50 billed annually, or €13 monthly. Premium is €27.50 billed annually, or €32 monthly ^[4]. Those were the euro prices on the day I wrote this, and platform pricing moves, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a fixed quote.

Here is where it gets interesting for a small business specifically. Removing the platform's branding from your own page is a Pro feature. So is SEO Settings, which is what lets you control your title tag and meta description, the two lines a searcher actually reads in Google before deciding whether to click ^[4].

So the tier a business realistically needs, the one where the page looks like it belongs to you and you can write your own search listing, is Pro. That is roughly €126 a year, billed annually, for a page of buttons on a domain that will never be yours.

For context, a complete Web60 site, built by describing your business and live in under a minute, is €60 a year with hosting, SSL, nightly backups, security and analytics included. I am not making a clever point about being cheaper. I am making a duller and more useful one: the money was never the reason people stayed on a bio link. Convenience was. And once the convenience argument is priced, it stops being convenient.

What the customer actually came to do

The Central Statistics Office publishes an annual read on how businesses here use the web, and the 2025 figures are quietly damning. Around 67% of enterprises had information about goods, services or prices on their website. Only about 29% offered online ordering, reservation or booking, and roughly 22% carried job advertisements or applications ^[5]. Those are enterprises with ten or more employees, so the picture for smaller operators is unlikely to be rosier.

Read those three numbers as a customer rather than a statistician. Two thirds of businesses will tell you what they sell. Fewer than a third will let you actually do the thing.

Consider a wedding cake maker in Offaly whose entire web presence is the link under her Instagram bio. A bride sees one of her cakes in a friend's photos in October, taps through, and finds nine buttons: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, a Google Maps pin, an email address, a Pinterest board, a form from a previous season and a phone number. Nothing says what a three-tier cake costs. Nothing lets her hold a date. She is on her phone, she has four suppliers to contact that evening, and the one who gets the booking is the one who let her book. That order was not lost to a competitor's better cakes. It was lost to a competitor's better fifteen seconds.

That is the whole argument, honestly. A website is not decoration and it is not a status symbol. It is the place where the interested stranger finishes what they started.

WordPress is the sensible foundation for that job, and not for sentimental reasons. W3Techs' running survey of the web put WordPress on roughly four in ten of all websites when I checked, and close to six in ten of every site whose content management system is identifiable ^[6]. That scale is the point. It means the plugin you need in two years exists, the person you hire in five years knows it, and nobody can quietly change the terms underneath you. A Facebook page is not a business website for exactly the same reason a bio link is not one. Someone else sets the rules.

Every extra tap between interest and booking is a place the customer can leave.

When a link in bio is genuinely the right tool

I want to be straight about this, because I have got it wrong myself.

A couple of years ago I told an owner that their bio link was fine for the time being and to come back to me after Christmas. They came back in March having spent the whole season fielding the same three questions in direct messages, one at a time, by thumb. The tool was not the mistake. Telling them it would hold was.

So here is the honest boundary. If your business genuinely is routing people to other platforms, a link-in-bio page is the correct tool and a website would be overhead you do not need. A musician sending listeners to a streaming service, a ticket seller and a merch store owns none of those transactions anyway. A one-off event with a six-week life. A campaign landing spot for a single promotion. In all of those, the page is doing exactly the job it was designed for, and it is doing it well.

The line is whether the transaction ends somewhere else by design, or ends somewhere else because you have not built anywhere for it to end.

One thing a website will not do for you

A proper site does not replace your social account, and anyone who tells you it does is selling something.

Nothing on your own domain gets discovered the way a reel does. Instagram will keep being where people find the cakes. Your bio link slot still matters enormously and you should still use it. The only change is where it points.

And be realistic about the switch itself. Moving means updating that link in a dozen places, and there is a tail of old posts, old flyers and old business cards that will keep sending people to the old address for years. There is no clean cut. You point the bio link at your domain, you fix the profiles you control, and you accept that the printed material runs out when it runs out.

Where this leaves you

The link in your bio was never the problem. It is a perfectly good bridge, and it will still be a perfectly good bridge next year.

The problem is what sits at the far end of it. If that is nine buttons, then every person who taps through has to make a second decision before they can do business with you, and a fair number of them will not bother. If it is a page with your prices, your work and a way to book, the bridge is doing what a bridge does.

You already have the hard part. You have the followers, the photographs and the reputation that made someone tap in the first place. What you decide next is simply where you want to send them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Linktree bad for SEO?

It is not that it damages your rankings. It is that it does not build anything for you. Search authority accumulates on the domain a page sits on, so traffic to a linktr.ee address strengthens that domain rather than yours. On the free and Starter tiers you cannot even set your own title tag or meta description, because SEO settings are gated to the Pro tier and above. Your own domain earns its own authority from the first day it is live.

Can I use my Linktree as my website on Google Business Profile?

You can physically paste the URL in, but it works against Google's own guidance. Google says not to provide URLs that refer users to landing pages other than those of the actual business, including pages created on social media sites, and its business links policy states that links cannot be social media sites, messaging links, app store links or link shorteners. Beyond the policy question, it wastes your highest-intent click by sending a ready-to-buy customer to a signpost.

Can I put my own domain name on a Linktree page?

No. Linktree's help centre states that it does not offer the option to use a custom domain to replace the linktr.ee URL, and suggests a redirect link if you want to direct people to your own website instead. Whatever you print, whatever you say on the phone, the address will carry the platform's brand in front of your business name.

Is a link-in-bio page cheaper than a website?

Only if you stay on the free tier and accept someone else's branding on your page. Removing that branding and controlling your own search listing requires the Pro tier, which was €10.50 a month billed annually when I checked, or roughly €126 a year. A complete Web60 website with hosting, SSL, backups, security and analytics is €60 a year. Compare the tier you would actually need, not the free one.

What should I do with my link in bio once I have a website?

Point it at your website and keep using it. The bio link is still how people cross over from social media to your own ground, and social platforms are still where most discovery happens for visual businesses. The one change worth making is to send people to a page that answers their question directly rather than to your home page, so someone who tapped because of a cake photo lands on cakes.

Do I need to be technical to move from a link-in-bio page to a real site?

No. That barrier is the thing that has genuinely changed in the last few years. You describe your business in plain English, an AI builder produces a full WordPress site, and you edit the wording yourself afterwards. The skill you need is knowing what your customers ask you most often, and you already have that from answering it in direct messages all year.