You Need NO MORE than 5 Website Pages—Here’s Why
A consistent struggle among new business owners is deciding how to package and present information and offerings.
And we affirm — it’s tough! Organizing and competitively marketing yourself is kind of a soft science—there’s no one correct, effective way, and it’s likely that over time you’ll find it necessary to regroup and reimagine the finer points of your business model many times (we have!).
But no matter in what stage you are, at least where your website is concerned, we have one strong recommendation:
Package everything you need to say into no more than four - five pages—generally Home, About, Services/Shop, Portfolio (if applicable), and Contact. Even if your business is uniquely multifaceted, paring down your website structure is in your best interest.
Here’s a few reasons why:
1. The attention spans of new website visitors are short. Visitors to unfamiliar sites spend, on average, only 52 seconds before giving up and clicking away if they don’t find the exact information for which they came. So it’s imperative that your website be easy to navigate—AKA, compact. One way to practically apply this idea is to group all service summary descriptions onto one page, as listed above, rather than host a separate page for each. This concept also certainly makes a strong argument for Internet style-informed copywriting, but more about that on another day.
2. Closely related to reason 1, one way that Google measures your website’s credibility is the duration of time visitors spend on individual pages. Here also, compact is crucial. Again, it’s not exactly a reliable science, but Google’s bots essentially assume that if people are liking what they see, they’re hanging out a little longer—AKA, the information on your website must be valuable, or at least interesting, and is, therefore, a valuable option for answering search queries. If so determined by Google to be ‘credible’, your website will begin appearing higher on the list of responses to Internet searches adjacent to your subject matter. This results not only in more organic traffic (the most valuable type to your opportunity for making sales, given that it represents people already motivated to offer your subject matter their time and attention), but also in more total clicks, another stat by which Google measures credibility and then responds by cyclically boosting your website even higher in response to searches.
3. More than your website is just a digital house for information about your business, it’s a strategic framework for guiding visitors through a predetermined sales funnel—AKA, one page leads to the next until you’ve effectively convinced somebody to perform a particular desired action, whether that be making a purchase, booking a service, or scheduling an appointment. And the more clear and compact that funnel, the more likely the visitor actually completes it! Imagine each of your website pages a unique and indispensable portion of the funnel shape. For example, your Home page is the widest piece, intended to capture and specify the vague interest with which people arrive on your website by presenting an attractive summary of your business’ purpose and offerings, and then guiding them onward, typically via button to the About page. And on from there. You get the gist. More to come regarding the strategic purpose and presentation of each website page from the perspective of your target audience.
True to this recommendation, our Signature Two-Week Website Intensive includes custom design of up to five website pages, complete with website copy optimized for search engines and sales funnel integration, and positioned according to your brand voice.
Explore the specifics of our process, and join our growing list of client success stories—get on our calendar today!
