Devstars
By Stuart Watkins, Founder & Director, Devstars · 7 min read
Click here to hear the audio version of this articleWondering if you need a website in 2026? It’s a fair question, especially when fewer people are clicking through to websites in 2026 than at any point in the last twenty years. So here’s a fair question, and one I’ve asked myself properly: do you still need one? After three decades building them, my answer has never been more confident.
I was working at A&M Records back in 1996 and I’ll never forget my boss saying to me, “Why on earth do we need websites for our artists?” Thirty years on, I’m hearing a version of the same question, dressed up in new clothes. Now that AI answers so much for us, and social media soaks up so much attention, do businesses still need their own site?
The website gets undervalued because it sits on the books as an expense, takes up valuable time, and is often misunderstood. What every business owner does understand is sales. And done well, your website has the biggest impact on sales of anything in your digital toolkit.
As a result the poor old website often gets neglected, and we see this a lot when new projects come in. If they were pets, we’d probably be calling the RSPCA. So let me make the case, honestly, for why your site matters more now than it ever has, and back every claim with a number you can check.
Part of the problem is where businesses put their energy instead. Every post on social media is rented space. The landlord can change the algorithm, bury your content, or suspend your account, and you have no say in any of it. Worse, the platforms are quietly walling themselves off.
97.8%
of US Facebook feed views in the second quarter of 2025 included no link out of Facebook at all. In the first such report, back in 2021, that figure was 86.5%. The walls are demonstrably getting higher, and that’s Meta’s own data, not a critic’s estimate.
Source: Meta, Widely Viewed Content Report, Q2 2025
And the platforms themselves are fragile. TikTok went dark across America overnight in January 2025, then spent a year under threat of a ban before a forced sale settled its future. Imagine building your whole audience on a channel that can be switched off by law.
Your website is different. You own it outright. Nobody can throttle it, bury it, or take it away. That’s why it should be the first port of call for everything you publish.
We understand social is important and it gets eyeballs. So how do you do everything, everywhere, all at once? You create your best content once, on your own site, in your own voice. Then you adapt it for everywhere else: LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, your newsletter, your Google Business Profile.
One strong article becomes a week of content across every channel, and all of it signals back to the one place you actually control.
Publishing in this order matters. It teaches Google and the AI platforms that your website is the origin, the source of truth. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI who to trust in your industry, those answers are built from well-structured, genuinely expert websites. Get this right and you earn a share of the AI’s voice that your competitors haven’t even noticed is up for grabs.
Here’s the honest counterpoint, because I promised you honesty. Fewer clicks reach websites now than at any time I can remember. In the first four months of 2026, more than two thirds of Google searches ended without a single click to the open web.
68%
of US Google searches now end without a click, up from 60% just two years ago. AI answers, instant results, and features that keep people on the results page are turning search into a walled garden.
Source: SparkToro / Similarweb, June 2026
Sounds like bad news for websites, doesn’t it? It isn’t. Because the visitors who do arrive have already done their research, and they’re ready to act. The quality has gone up even as the quantity has come down.
42% better
Visitors arriving from AI tools converted 42% better than other traffic in spring 2026, a complete reversal from a year earlier when they converted worse. Fewer visits, far better ones. That’s a trade I’ll take all day long.
Source: Adobe Analytics, March 2026
This changes the job of your website. It’s shifted from being a traffic magnet to being a conversion point. So the emphasis has to shift too, onto conversion rate optimisation: getting someone from landing on your page to engaging or buying, as quickly and smoothly as possible. And you don’t have long.
10 seconds
is roughly all you get. Nielsen Norman Group’s research shows visitors decide whether to stay or leave within about ten seconds of landing. Meanwhile the typical landing page converts at just 6.6%, which means most sites are losing buyers at the point of sale.
Sources: Nielsen Norman Group · Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report, 2024
The maths of fixing this is lovely. Take a page from a 1% conversion rate to 2% and you’ve doubled your results without spending a penny more getting people there. That’s what conversion rate optimisation really is. Not fiddling with button colours, but stripping out every bit of friction between someone landing and someone acting.
We’ve always known people are impatient. Google found more than half of us give up if a page takes longer than three seconds to load, and nobody has got more patient since.
53%
of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load. That research is from 2016. If anything, the bar is higher now.
Source: Google / DoubleClick, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, 2016
But there’s a new audience now, and it’s even less forgiving than we are. The AI crawlers, the bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Google, are the ones deciding whether you get quoted in an AI answer. And here’s the thing: they don’t hang about.
When a crawler visits your site, it’s trying to scan and catalogue the whole thing as efficiently as possible. It gives your page a second or two. If your site is slow, or buried under heavy scripts, it simply moves on to a faster competitor and starts cataloguing theirs instead.
18× fewer
citations for pages that frequently time out for AI crawlers, according to 2026 analysis, in many cases none at all. This isn’t a ranking penalty where you slip down the list. It’s a gate. Slow, to an AI, means invisible.
Sources: iPullRank & Profound, 2026
Being slow doesn’t just push you down the list any more. It takes you off it.
This is exactly why a cheap, off-the-shelf theme stuffed with plugins no longer cuts it. Those builds are heavy, and that weight now costs you visibility with both people and machines. A website in 2026 has to be built on purpose: fast, clean, and structured so a human and a crawler can both read it in a heartbeat. Core Web Vitals and page speed aren’t a technical footnote any more. They’re the price of entry.
More than ever. The website hasn’t died, it’s changed jobs. From traffic magnet to source of truth and conversion point. Over thirty years I’ve watched plenty of platforms come and go. Your own site, and the email list you build from it, are the only things that have outlasted them all.
uick, high-impact checks you can start today.
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Devstars · Bespoke web software & digital growth consultancy · Jersey & London. Solving complex problems with creative, planet-friendly digital solutions. devstars.com · stuart@devstars.co.uk
Note: AI-crawler timeout and citation figures are drawn from independent industry analysis rather than the AI providers’ own published documentation.
Tell me what you’re trying to fix. Half an hour, no pitch, no slide deck.
If we’re the right fit we’ll talk about what’s next. If we’re not, I’ll point you to someone who is.
