Many website owners are interested in how many pages a website should have in order to achieve the goals for which it was created. We at Effective Marketing & Design are getting various requests from clients who don't know what to have on their website to those who are ready to start with 20+ pages full of content. Who is right?
As long as the business owner understands that the creation of a website is only the first step on a long path of its development and promotion, then she/he is right. There are many factors that can significantly affect the success of the website.
So, how to understand how many pages should be on your website so that it really allows you to achieve the desired results?
Let's start with the fact that there is no specific number of website pages or at least some algorithm for determining the number of pages on a website. The first version of your website can really be a long scroll landing page or a classic "five-page" website. Sometimes, it is important to have your presence online as soon as possible, have a link to add to your social media accounts, and be found in Google. But it would help if you never stopped there. The unique content of your website must constantly increase.
Thus, fresh, unique content should appear on the website regularly - the more pages with useful and unique content on the website, the better. For search engines, a website with more pages can provide more useful information to targeted visitors. This means that they are more likely to take the actions that are expected of them. Perhaps they will not do it right away, but if they like the site, they will most likely return to it, and more than once.
If visitors see that there is practically nothing on the website that interests them, then they are unlikely to take any targeted action right now and might never return to the website again. At the same time, a website with a lot of pages and content has to have good navigation, otherwise, a visitor can get frustrated and never get to see desired content.
So, a website with many pages has an advantage over its competitors only if it offers convenient navigation and call to actions.
The more the website is liked by target visitors (determined by how often they click on it and how long they stay), the more they will carry out the expected actions. That leads to the higher search traffic, which means more targeted visitors.
But it is different in the case of eCommerce websites. When shopping, the most important thing for a website visitor is to land on a page with the desired product rather than having lots of information to read. In that case, a website can be just a simple landing page showing the products' advantages and offering easy navigation within the store.
The first thing to remember is the quality of the text. It must be interesting and useful for website visitors.
The second important aspect is the amount of text placed on one page of the website. Experts believe that a website page should not be less than 2-3 thousand characters without spaces. This means that in order to increase the number of pages on your website, you cannot simply cut some interesting article into a large number of pages containing only a couple of paragraphs of text.