How Many Pages Does Your Website Need?

The short answer to this question is: more.

As long as you have good content to fill them with, more pages will always be good. Search engines love fresh content, human beings like to find new things when they explore — there’s really no downside.

But it’s not always that simple. Sometimes the number of pages is dictated by budgetary constraints, or time constraints. So let’s recast the question as this: How Many Pages Does Your Website Have to Have?

In order to answer this, you have to consider the purposes of the various pages in a typical website.

• The homepage

The point of your homepage is to bring people to your business’s spot on the web, to introduce yourself well enough that they want to stay, and to help them navigate to the other pages you have on your website. Apart from naked blogs with no homepages, websites normally need to have a homepage. It should be strong for search and have terrific navigation. It should make the USP of your business abundantly clear, and let people know what you’re selling and how they can get it. That’s about it.

• The products or services page

You need a page or pages that convey the details about what your business offers. That can be a full-on catalog, if you’re an e-commerce site, or it can be a single page that details your single product or service if you’re something like a cleaning service. If you have anything more complicated to offer than “monthly cleaning, $50,” then you should have subpages that divide the products and services section up in a logical way. People would rather click a couple of times — with confidence that they’re heading where they want to go — than scan an enormous page of complex information.

• Credibility pages

Credibility pages contain the evidence that you are a good choice for your visitors, when it comes to your products and services. You can do without these if you have to. However, visitors who are thinking about using your services or buying your products like to see this kind of evidence. These are the FAQ pages, the pages of recipes for the ingredient you’re selling, the details about your process. This can also be your blog, your portfolio, your gallery, your awards, even your links page. This is where you put useful or fun stuff to bring customers back repeatedly. This is where you show the good qualities you show in the physical world if your business lives there, too.

• The About Us page

People go to your About us page when they’re inclined to buy, but need a bit of reassurance. This is where you show that you’re a bona fide, trustworthy business, by sharing your address, years in business, names of the workers, photo of the staff or building, qualifications, or whatever else you have to build confidence.

• The Contact page

Your customers need to have a way to contact you. Visitors may come in for no other reason than to get your phone number or your physical address (who uses phone books anymore?), and a contact page lets them get the info fast and get on over to see you. If you want to avoid a Contact page, you can combine it with your About Us page, but Contact pages are generally a good idea.

There are, as you can see, five basic kinds of pages your site ought to include. Think about the purposes these pages serve, and you’ll see that you’re best off having all five. This is where I get the term “basic five-page website” which you see around here sometimes. Try not to leave any of these items out when you put your website together.