Do Authors Still Need Their Own Websites?
Social platforms are louder. A website is still the only place you fully control.
The case against, taken seriously
The argument against bothering with a personal author website is not stupid. Social platforms have vastly more built-in traffic than any individual website will ever generate organically. A well-run social presence can reach more readers in a week than a personal site reaches in a year. Building and maintaining a website takes time that could go into writing or into the platforms actually driving discovery. For a writer optimizing purely for near-term reach, skipping the website and putting that effort into social platforms is a defensible call, and plenty of successful working writers have made it.
The case for, and why it's not about reach
The case for a personal website isn't about reach. It's about ownership and continuity, two things social platforms structurally can't provide. A social account exists at the discretion of a platform whose policies, algorithm, and business model can change without notice and have, repeatedly, across the industry's history, changed in ways that reduced individual creators' reach overnight. An email list built from a personal website, or a body of published work hosted somewhere the writer controls, doesn't disappear because a platform adjusted its algorithm or shut down a feature. It's the difference between renting distribution and owning it, and the value of that difference only becomes obvious at the moment a rented channel changes the terms.
What a website actually needs to do
A useful author website doesn't need to be elaborate. At minimum, it needs three things: a clear description of who the writer is and what they write, in a form a new visitor can understand in ten seconds; a way to collect direct contact with interested readers, almost always an email signup, since email remains the one channel a writer fully owns the relationship on; and a home for the writer's actual body of work, published pieces, books, credits, that exists independent of any single platform's continued goodwill. Everything beyond that, elaborate design, blog frequency, extensive archives, is optional and should be added only if it serves those three functions better, not as an end in itself.
The real answer: both, with a website as the anchor
The most functional setup for most working writers today isn't website-instead-of-social or social-instead-of-website. It's social platforms for reach and discovery, converting attention on those platforms into direct relationships, an email signup, a bookmark, a purchase, that funnel back to a website the writer actually owns. The social platform does the loud, short-term work of finding new readers. The website does the quiet, long-term work of keeping them, in a place no algorithm change can take away.