How Many Pages Should a Website Have?
Five to ten pages is the honest starting point for a small business, and the site grows from there by what your customers search for. The pages every website needs, when a page is too thin to stand alone, and why copied city pages hurt.
Mike Lopez
Designs and builds websites and B2B software
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How many pages a website should have depends on what you sell and what your customers search for, and I think the honest starting point for a small business is five to ten pages, a home page, an about page, a page for each service, a page of work or results, a contact page and a privacy notice. From there a website should grow by one page for each thing which a buyer searches for on its own, such as a separate service or a separate location, and it should stop at the point where a new page would mostly repeat one which already exists. Google’s own guidance on helpful content warns against producing lots of pages in the hope that some of them rank, so the number which matters is how many pages have something of their own to say.
This post goes through the pages which every website needs, how I decide when a service or a location deserves its own page, when a page is too thin to stand alone, and what happened when the pages on this website started to look like copies of each other.
The pages every website needs
Every website I design starts from the same short list, because each of these pages answers a question which almost every visitor asks. Some of them can be folded into another page on a very small site, but the question still needs an answer somewhere.
| Page | The question it answers | Can it be folded in? |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Is this the right business for me? | No, it is the page most people see first |
| About | Who is behind it, and can I trust them? | On a one-person site it can sit on the home page |
| Services, one page each | Do you do the thing I need, and how? | Only when the services are so close that one buyer wants all of them |
| Work, results or reviews | Have you done it before? | It can sit on each service page if there are only a few examples |
| Contact | How do I reach you? | A form in a popup and the footer can carry it |
| Privacy notice | What happens to my details? | No, it should be its own page linked from every form and the footer |
Nielsen Norman Group’s research on about us information found that people use the about section to judge whether a company is genuine, and that they mostly leave for a search engine when they cannot find what they want there, so I would keep the about page even on a small site. This website follows the same list, with a home page, an about page, a projects page with a page for each case study, a journal and a privacy notice, and the contact form opens from every page instead of living on a page of its own.
One page for each service which people search for
The pages after the core list should follow how your customers search. If people search for each of your services by its own name, each service should have its own page, because a single page which lists six services can only rank for one of them well and it gives every visitor a long scroll to find the one which they came for. If your customers only ever search for the business as a whole, a single services page with a clear section for each one is enough.
I check this before the design starts by typing each service into Google and reading what the search box suggests, and then I write the list of pages from those phrases. On this website the services became seven pages across three kinds of work, website design, web development and UI/UX design, since each of those has its own buyers and its own searches. Six capability pages sit beside them in the main menu, one for each role which I take on.
When a page is too thin to stand alone
A page earns its place when it can answer its question with something specific, such as the steps, the prices or the range of prices, the examples and the common questions for that one service. A page which only has two paragraphs and a button is mostly better as a section on its parent page, and I would merge it until there is enough real content to split it out again. Google’s SEO starter guide says there is no magical word count target, minimum or maximum, so the test is whether a visitor would learn something on that page which they could not learn on the one next to it.
The same test works for blog posts. One topic per post, taken deeper, makes a better page than one long post which tries to cover everything, and it gives you a page for each question which people really ask.
Why copied location and service pages hurt
The fastest way to make a website bigger is to copy one page and change the city or the service name, and it’s really the way which causes the most trouble. Google’s spam policies on doorway abuse list pages targeted at specific regions or cities which funnel people to one page, and substantially similar pages which are closer to search results than to a clear, browseable hierarchy. The starter guide adds that duplicate content on its own is not a spam violation, but Google picks one version to show and the copies mostly go unseen, so the extra pages do nothing for you either way.
This website has local pages, each for one service in one place, and in September I measured how much text pages of the same service shared with each other. Because only the opening paragraph differed, two pages of the same service shared between 66% and 87% of their text, so I rewrote the city pages around the buyer which each place really has, with their own rows, process, questions and examples, and the rewritten pages now share about a fifth of their text or less. I keep each new page under 30% shared with the other pages of its service. When I added a second page for the same service in the same city, I gave it its own buyer and its own search phrase, because two pages which answer the same search compete with each other.
A multi-location business has the same problem in another form, since a copied location page keeps the details of the location which it came from. My post on multi-location website design goes through what a copied page keeps and how to check it.
How I count the pages before the design
I count the pages from the copy, before anyone draws a layout. The list of services and locations becomes a sitemap, each page on the sitemap has a sentence about what it answers, and the pages which share a layout become one template, so a website with forty pages might only need four or five designs. My post on writing your website copy before the design explains why the words decide the size of the site, and how to write a website brief covers the list of services and locations which the sitemap is made from.
If you want to check your own website today, open each page and write down in one sentence the question which it answers. Pages whose sentences are the same should become one page, and a question which your customers ask with no page to answer it is the next page to write.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages should a website have?
A small business mostly starts with five to ten pages, home, about, one page for each service, work or reviews, contact and a privacy notice. Add a page for each service or location which customers search for separately, and stop when a new page would repeat an existing one.
How many pages should a website have for SEO?
There is no number which Google rewards, and its guidance warns against making pages in the hope that some of them rank. One page for each question which people search for, with something specific on it, does more than many thin pages.
Is a one-page website enough?
For a single service with a single audience it can be, such as an event or a product launch. Once you offer several services or serve several places, separate pages let each one answer its own search.
Should every location have its own page?
Yes, if each location has its own address, team, hours or services, and people search for it by name. Each page should carry those details and its own content, since pages which only swap the city name look like doorway pages to Google.
Can I add more pages later?
Yes, and I think that is usually the better way, starting with the core pages and adding one when you have the content for it. A template for each kind of page makes every later page quicker to build, which you can see in the case studies on my projects page.
