Do artists still need a website? What it is actually for

Ask an artist for their portfolio and most will send an Instagram handle. That works right up until the person asking is a gallery director, a juror, or a collector who met you at a fair three weeks ago and is trying to remember your name. What those people do next is type your name into a search bar, and what they find decides how seriously they take you.

So the question is not really whether artists still need a website. It is what a website is for, now that social media does the part it used to do.

Discovery and decision are two different jobs

Social platforms are very good at one thing: putting your work in front of people who were not looking for it. That is discovery, and no website does it. Nobody browses the open web hoping to stumble across a painter.

But almost nobody commits from a feed either. A feed shows the newest thing first, crops the work to fit, strips out the dimensions, buries the price in a comment, and gives a serious viewer no way to see what you were doing two years ago or whether the piece they liked is still available. The decision — to write to you, to shortlist you, to buy — happens somewhere quieter, where the work is in order and the facts are on the page.

That somewhere is your website. Social is the road; the site is the destination. Artists whose following never seems to turn into anything usually have plenty of road and nowhere for it to lead. It is also the difference between an audience you own and one you rent.

What a website does that a profile cannot

• It answers your name. When someone searches for you after a studio visit or a submission, your site is the result that is entirely yours — not a profile that shows them three ads and a suggestion to follow someone else.
• It shows a body of work, not a stream. Series grouped as series, in the order you meant, each piece with its title, year, medium, size and price or availability — which is exactly what a gallerist or juror scans for.
• It carries what the art world asks for. Statement, bio, CV, exhibition history, press, a contact address that works. Erica Berkowitz, co-owner of Haven Gallery, put it plainly in an interview about getting noticed by galleries: "Web presence is extremely important in getting noticed and considered by galleries… Make sure yours is clean-cut and updated with your most recent body of work, relevant links, and C.V."
• It does not change under you. Your address is the same next year. Nothing reorders it, throttles it, or locks you out of it — and accounts do get lost. The Art Newspaper has reported on artists whose Instagram accounts were hacked and never recovered, including one who lost an audience he and his colleagues had spent years building.
• It can take the money. A profile sends an interested stranger into your messages, where you negotiate by hand. A site can sell the piece at two in the morning while you are asleep.

People really do buy art from a screen

This used to be the objection: nobody buys a painting they have not stood in front of. That stopped being true some time ago. In the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025, e-commerce held steady at 18% of total art market sales in 2024 — double its share before 2020. The last Hiscox Online Art Trade Report, covering 2022, found 78% of the collectors it surveyed had bought art online that year.

You do not need those numbers to be enormous for the point to hold. Buying from a screen is now normal behaviour, and the screen people buy from is usually a page with a price on it.

The honest part: your website will not bring you traffic

A new artist website gets no visitors. None. Search engines take months to trust a new domain, and nobody is searching for "abstract painter" and finding you on page one. If the site is going to work, something has to point at it:

• Instagram, where the relationship gets built even though the platform sends very little traffic anywhere.
• Facebook, where local collectors and groups actually share things.
• Pinterest, the one platform that behaves like a search engine and keeps sending people to a page for years.
• LinkedIn, if your work touches commissions, consultants or corporate collections.
• Everything offline: your show cards, labels, business cards, email signature, the sign on your booth.

The other honest thing: a neglected site is worse than no site. A page whose newest work is from four years ago, whose contact form goes nowhere, whose shop says "coming soon" — that tells a gallerist something about you, and it is not what you want it to say. Budget an afternoon a few times a year, not just the afternoon you build it.

Do you need one yet?

Yes, now, if you are selling at fairs or markets, applying to juried shows or galleries, taking commissions, teaching, or getting any press. In all of those, somebody is going to look you up within a day or two of meeting you.

It can wait a little if you have a handful of finished pieces and have not shown anywhere yet. Photograph and catalogue the work first. The site is a step behind that, and it is much easier to build when the work is already organised.

Common mistakes

• Treating a link-in-bio page as a website. It is a list of links; it holds no work, ranks for nothing, and disappears when the service does.
• Keeping the portfolio in a PDF you email on request. The people deciding will not request it.
• Putting up every piece you have made since school. Editing is part of the work — see what belongs on the site and what does not.
• No prices anywhere and no way to ask. "Enquire" is a fine answer; silence is not.
• Photographs shot at an angle, in yellow light, with a corner of the studio in frame.
• A contact form nobody has ever tested. Send yourself one.
• Rebuilding the whole site every two years instead of adding the new work to the one you have.

Where the friction usually is

Most artists do not avoid having a website because they doubt it matters. They avoid it because of what it costs in admin: the same painting gets typed in four times — once in the inventory spreadsheet, once on the website, once in the shop listing, once in a submission form — and every price change means finding all four again.

That is the part Art Easely is built around. You catalogue a piece once, with its images, size, medium, year, price and availability, and that record is what your website, your shop, your labels, your certificates of authenticity and your price lists all read from. Change the price in one place and it is changed everywhere. Your bio, statement and CV live in the same place and go on the site when you are ready.

The site runs on your own domain with SSL included on any paid plan — Grow if you want a gallery site without a shop, Thrive if you want collectors to be able to buy, with no commission taken on what you sell.

If you are starting from nothing, the order that works is: catalogue the work, choose an address you will keep, put up the pages that earn their place, then worry about being found.

Whatever you build it with, build it. The work of getting noticed is hard enough without the person who went looking for you finding nothing.