How Many Pages Does a Small Business Website Actually Need?

Most small business websites need somewhere between five and seven pages. That usually means a home page, an about page, a services or products page, a contact page, and one page that builds trust, such as testimonials, case studies or a portfolio of your work. Anything beyond that should earn its place. More pages are not automatically better, and a visitor who cannot find what they need in two or three clicks is a visitor who leaves. The right number for your site depends on what you sell and how people actually search for it.

The pages almost every business needs

Before you add anything clever, make sure these basics are solid.

• Home page – says who you are, what you do, and who it is for, in the first few seconds.
• About page – the story, the people and the proof that turns a curious visitor into an enquiry.
• Services or products page – set out clearly, with enough detail that a visitor does not need to ring you to understand what is on offer. Have a look at how we structure our own services page for an example.
• Contact page – phone number, email, a simple form and, if you have one, a physical address.
• Trust page – testimonials, case studies or a gallery of completed work.

That is a genuinely useful five-page site. Plenty of good small business websites stop right there.

When you need more than the basics

A few situations call for extra pages, and each one should be there because it earns its keep, not because it seems expected.

• You offer genuinely different services that people search for separately. A plumber who also does gas fitting benefits from two pages, because those are two different searches on Google.
• You serve more than one area and want to be found locally in each one. We do this ourselves with separate pages for Penrith and Canberra, rather than one page trying to rank everywhere at once.
• You get the same questions over and over, which is a good reason for a dedicated FAQ page.
• You want to build authority and keep bringing people back, which is what a blog or insights section is for. Have a browse of our own insights page to see what that looks like over time.

Pages that quietly work against you

More pages can hurt just as easily as help. Watch out for these three.

• Thin, near-duplicate service pages. Five pages that all say roughly the same thing in different words confuse both visitors and search engines.
• Coming soon pages. An empty page with no content is worse than no page at all.
• Old pages nobody maintains. Outdated pricing, discontinued services or an old team photo undermine the trust you are trying to build everywhere else.

How to work out the right number for you

Start with what a first-time visitor actually needs to make a decision, not with what you think a website is supposed to have. Map out the two or three questions a new customer always asks before they buy, and build a page around each one. It also helps to know what people are typing into Google before they land on you. If you want a hand with that kind of research, our colleagues at Defyn Digital specialise in exactly that sort of keyword and content planning.

When we plan a new build through our WordPress web design process, we always start with this same question. A well-planned five-page site outperforms a rambling twenty-page one almost every time, because every page has a job to do.

If you are not sure whether your current site has the right pages, too many, or a few important ones missing, give us a call on 02 9834 4119 or head to our contact page and we will have a look.