Link in Bio for a Local Business: What to Put and in What Order

A customer finds your Instagram at nine in the evening, likes what they see, and taps the link in your bio. Ten seconds later they are back on Instagram, because the link opened something that did not answer their question. For a shop, a salon or a trade, the bio link is often the only door between a profile visit and a booking. What decides whether anyone walks through it is not the tool you use. It is which links you put on the page, in what order, and what you leave out.

Why does a local business need a link-in-bio page when Instagram allows five links?

Since April 2023 Instagram lets an account attach up to five links directly in the bio. That sounds like the problem is solved, but five bare links still leave every decision to the visitor. They see short titles with no context, no photos, no prices and no opening hours. They cannot tell which link books a table and which one opens a supplier catalogue. Most will tap the first, find it is not what they wanted, and give up rather than try the second.

A link-in-bio page does the deciding for them. It shows each option with a line of explanation, puts the action that earns money at the top, and keeps everything else one tap away. Think of the five Instagram links as a pile of business cards on a counter, and the page as the person behind the counter who asks what you need and points you to the right one.

Which links earn a place on the page?

A local business page exists to turn a profile visit into a visit, a booking or a call. Every link on it should serve one of those three ends. In practice, five kinds of link earn their place:

A hairdresser in this shape shows "Book online" first, then "Prices", then "Reviews", then "Find us", then "Christmas gift sets" in November and nothing in its place in February. A plumber shows "Request a quote" first and "Recent work" photos instead of reviews, because photos are the proof in that trade. The five slots stay the same; only the labels change.

How many links should a local business show?

Five or fewer. Every extra link taxes all the others: with twelve links nobody reads past the fourth, and the booking button drowns somewhere in the middle. If you already have a page with nine or ten links, cut it this way. Merge everything that answers "where and when" into one "Visit us" destination. Merge every social profile into small icons at the bottom, not full-width buttons. Delete anything nobody tapped in the last three months; most pages with statistics will tell you exactly which links those are.

The test is simple. Show the page to someone who has never seen your business and give them ten seconds. If they cannot tell you what you do and what to tap first, there are too many links, or the wrong one is on top.

What order should the links go in?

Order by intent, not by pride. The business owner wants the award from 2019 at the top; the customer wants the booking button. Set the order in four passes:

1. Put the money action first. Book, call, order or request a quote. Whatever pays the rent goes in position one, with a verb in the label, not your business name.
2. Put the proof second. Menu with prices, photo gallery or reviews. This is for the visitor who wants the first link but needs one reassurance before tapping it.
3. Put the practical details third. Hours, address and directions in one place. These serve people who have already decided to come.
4. Put the fresh item last. The seasonal offer or announcement. It changes through the year, so keep it at the bottom where swapping it disturbs nothing above.

Revisit the order twice a year, or whenever the business has a season. A restaurant moves "Terrace menu" up in May and buries it in October. A salon moves "Gift vouchers" to second place in December and back to the bottom in January. The page is a shop window, and shop windows get redressed.

What should stay off the page?

• Full-width buttons to every social profile. The visitor came from Instagram; sending them to Facebook to send them back to your site is a round trip nobody completes. Small icons at the bottom are enough.
• PDF menus and price lists. They load slowly on a phone, pinch and zoom badly, and cannot be updated without replacing the file. Put the menu on the page itself, where the same page your QR code opens already keeps it current.
• Popups, autoplay videos and newsletter gates. Anything that stands between the tap and the answer costs you the visitor. Collect an email at the booking step, after they have what they came for.
• Links that belong to someone else's funnel. Supplier catalogues, booking platforms you no longer check, the old address on a different domain. Every dead or borrowed link teaches the visitor that your links cannot be trusted.

Sources and method

The five-link limit for Instagram bios comes from Meta's April 2023 announcement and Instagram's help centre page on adding links to a profile, both consulted on 31 October 2026. Link order, the five-or-fewer rule and the ten-second test are the author's own working method, drawn from setting up pages for shops, salons and trades. No prices, volumes or third-party statistics are cited in this article.

Start with the order, not the design. Open your page, keep five links, put the booking tap first and delete one thing that earns nothing. If you have not built the page yet, read setting up your first page in five minutes first. If search visitors matter as much as Instagram ones, put the right page in your Google website field too, and consider a custom domain for the page once the content earns it.