One page or five? Working out how big your website needs to be

You've been quoted for a five or six page site and you're not sure you need all of it. Or someone's told you a one-pager will do and you're worried it'll look like you cut corners.

Page count follows the job the site has to do, and most trades need fewer pages than they think. This post is about working out which side you're on before you pay for anything.

Pages aren't the point. What someone needs to decide is

A website has one job: get someone from finding you to ringing you. Pages are just how you arrange the information on the way.

Before anyone calls, they need to work out four things:

• What you actually do
• Whether you cover their area
• Whether you look like you know what you're doing
• How to get hold of you

That's it. If all four fit comfortably on one scroll, one page is enough.

Here's the bit most people don't get told: adding pages that repeat the same information makes a site worse. Split your phone number, your area and your prices across five pages and someone has to hunt for the answer they came for. Most won't. They'll go back to the search results and try the next name on the list.

When one page does the job

One page works when the answers are short. One service or a tight set of them, one town, prices that don't need explaining, and the thing you want people to do is ring or book.

That covers a lot of businesses: a clinic, a salon, a sole trader doing one trade, a craft business where photos of the work do most of the selling.

Okus Dental is one of my demo sites, a fictional private dental clinic in Old Town. Treatments and prices sit on the page with nothing to click, there's a booking form at the bottom and one phone number.

Ridgeway Stone, another demo, is a fictional stonemasons in Chippenham. Same idea, different job: the scroll walks you through how the work gets done, start to finish.

When one page stops working

One page stops working when it has to answer too many different questions at once. The triggers are fairly obvious once you list them:

• Several genuinely different services, searched for by different people (extensions, driveways, groundworks)
• More than one town or area you want to be found in
• A gallery of finished jobs big enough to bury the contact details
• Team, accreditation or insurance detail that matters on bigger jobs
• Anything with a login or a payment

Big Builds is a demo site I built for a fictional Swindon building and landscaping firm, and it splits by service for that reason. Someone after a patio lands on the patio page and reads about patios, not extensions.

The other benefit is that a page about one thing gives Google something specific to show for a specific search. Modest gain, but real.

The cost difference is smaller than people expect

Five pages doesn't cost five times what one page costs. The design, the build setup, the forms, the hosting: that work happens once, whether it's serving one page or six. What you pay extra for is the content and layout of each additional page, so the curve flattens out fast after the first one. The tiers on my services page show where the lines fall.

The part people underestimate is the writing. Building page four takes me an afternoon. Working out what page four should say, and getting the words off you, is what drags a job out for weeks.

So a straight rule: if you haven't got the words for page four yet, don't buy page four. Buy it when you've written it.

Start small and add pages later

Picking one page now doesn't lock you in. A site I build as a one-pager is built the same way as a five-page one underneath, so adding page four later means reusing the design, the forms and the styling that already exist. It's an afternoon, not a rebuild.

Two signs it's time. You keep typing the same long explanation into emails, so it should be a page. Or you want to turn up for a search your current page doesn't really answer.

The opposite habit is worse. Buying five pages and leaving three with two lines of filler on them reads as unfinished, and people notice.

All four of my demo sites are fictional businesses, and you can see them side by side on the demos page: one-pagers next to a multi-page build, so you can judge the difference yourself.

A quick way to decide before you ring anyone

Five questions, and you can answer them on the back of an envelope.

1. How many genuinely different things do you sell, in the sense that different people search for them?
2. How many towns or areas do you want to turn up for?
3. Have you got photos of finished work, or are you starting from nothing?
4. Does anyone need to log in or pay on the site?
5. Could you write the words for every page this month?

Then the rule I'd use: one page, unless two or more of those answers push the other way. One service, one town, no logins, and you're fine on a single scroll. Three services across four towns with a folder full of photos, and you've got a multi-page site whether you wanted one or not.

If you're not sure which side you fall on, tell me what you sell and where you work and I'll tell you what I think you need. Sometimes that's one page and a smaller invoice for me. I'd rather say that up front than build you four pages you never fill in.