Do I need a personal website?

[#1]

Hi, I am a freelancer in Design and creative sector. I previously had my own website with my protfolio and services set up that I would link in my proposal with a sentence like - You can be guarnteed industry standard because I have my own website service or something like that. A couple of my clients had refrenced it back to me. My question is, is this something I should spend money and time on? I was thinking that in the long run I could even start doing ads to get traffic. 

What do you think, will it have any real benefit or turn out to be something worth investing in?

Thanks 

[#2]

I think a personal or business website can be beneficial. In the case of an illustrator, the personal/business website can serve two (or more) purposes: 1) it allows you to easily advertise to and find clients outside of Upwork; 2) it allows you to provide a space where prospective Upwork clients can see more artwork in addition to your Upwork portfolio.

I think some Upwork clients prefer to see portfolios within Upwork, and might not click to visit a website. However, as an illustrator, you might want a personal or business website to showcase exact or full views of your art since Upwork has limitations on image dimensions.

Plus, you can use your personal website to link to your Upwork profile if you want. For advertising purposes, many freelancers add their Upwork profile link to their social media (i.e., LinkedIn, IG, Facebook, etc.) since so many eyeballs are already perusing those sites, and it can be difficult to generate traffic to a personal website.

[#3]

Hi Clark, thank you for the detailed response! You've raised some great points about the benefits of having a personal website but yes, I think I will be putting off the website for now and focus on my Upwork profile 🙂