Do you need a website or an app?

We get asked for apps fairly often. About half the time, once we’ve talked it through, what the business actually needs is a website. Not because apps are bad, but because the two solve different problems, and it’s easy to reach for the more exciting one.

Here’s how we think it through, so you can spend on the thing that earns its keep.

Start with how people find you

A website’s great strength is that strangers can find it. Someone searches, your site comes up, they’re on it a second later with nothing to install. That’s the top of almost every business: being discovered by people who don’t know you yet.

An app can’t do that. Nobody downloads an app for a business they’ve never heard of. They have to already want you enough to go to a store, install it, and make room on their phone. That’s a high bar, and it’s the wrong tool for getting found.

So if your main job is winning new customers, you need a website. Full stop. This is most businesses, most of the time.

When an app earns its place

Apps are for people who already use you, often, and would benefit from something a website can’t easily do. A few cases where they genuinely make sense:

• Frequent, repeat use. A loyalty scheme, a booking app for regulars, a tool customers open weekly. The icon on the home screen is the point.
• Things the phone does and the browser doesn’t, or doesn’t do as well. Reliable push notifications, working properly offline, deeper use of the camera or location.
• A product where the app is the thing you sell, not a shopfront for something else.

If that’s you, an app can be worth every penny. The test is simple: would someone open it more than once a week, and does it do something a website honestly can’t.

The cost is not the same

This matters, so we’ll be blunt. An app is usually a bigger build than a website, and it doesn’t end at launch. There are two platforms to support, store rules to follow, approvals to wait on, and updates to keep shipping as phones change. A website you can put live and largely leave alone.

Spending app money before you have a website that brings people in is putting the roof on before the walls. We’ve talked people out of it more than once, and they’ve thanked us later.

The usual right answer

For most businesses the order is: get a fast, clear website doing the work of finding and converting customers. Once that’s humming and you’ve got a base of regulars who’d use something more, look at an app for them specifically.

We build both, so we’ve no reason to push you toward one or the other. We’d rather you spent once on the right thing than twice fixing the wrong one. If you’re weighing it up, tell us what you’re trying to do and we’ll give you a straight answer.