The basics · 5 min read
How many pages should my website have?
The short answer
Most small business websites need about five to nine pages, one for each decision a customer makes and one for each service you want to be found for. That usually means a home page, a page per service, contact, about and some proof. More pages don't rank better on their own; focused ones do.
On this page
Five to nine pages, and how to count them
Most small business websites need about five to nine pages. That's where you land when you count the jobs the site has to do instead of the pages.
A page earns its place by doing one of two things: settling a decision a customer is making (where are you, what does it cost, can I trust you), or being the page that gets found when someone searches for one specific thing you do. Count those and the number falls out on its own. A page that does neither is a menu item, not a page.
The pages nearly every business needs
- Home. A switchboard, not an introduction: who you are, where you are, what you do, and a fast route to the two or three things most people came for.
- What you sell, one page per service or category. This is where the site earns its search traffic, and it's usually the part that gets the least attention.
- Contact, with the details as text on the page: address, phone, hours, a map, a form. On many small business sites it's the most visited page.
- About, but only if it's specific. How to write an about page covers why the generic version is dead weight.
- Proof. Reviews and past work. Its own page or folded into the service pages, but somewhere.
- Prices, if you can bear to publish them. Most businesses can't, and it costs them more than they think.
That's the spine. Everything else is a judgement call.
A typical page set by type of business
The same counting gives a different set for each shape of business:
| Business | A typical set of pages |
|---|---|
| Café or restaurant | Home, menu, about, contact or booking |
| Salon or barber | Home, services and prices, booking, contact |
| Trades business | Home, one page per service, areas covered, contact |
| Clinic or professional practice | Home, one page per service, the team, contact and booking |
| Small online shop | Home, shop, delivery and returns, contact |
A café is well served by four or five pages. A trade doing five kinds of work wants a page for each, which is how it reaches eight or nine; a website for plumbers, electricians and trades walks through that set. A portfolio site needs few pages and a handful of strong projects, so what a business portfolio should include matters more than the count. And some businesses start with a single page: what a landing page is covers when one page doing one job is the right call.
Pages and SEO: one focused page per service
More pages don't rank better on their own. A page can only be found for what it's about, so what helps is each page being clearly about one thing.
The most common mistake is one "Services" page listing nine things in nine paragraphs. It is strongly about nothing, so it competes weakly for all nine searches. Nine pages, each about one service with its own price, photos and common questions answered, compete properly for nine different searches, and each can be the page an AI assistant quotes when someone asks about that service.
The test: if someone searched for exactly one of your services and landed on the combined page, would they have to hunt for their paragraph? If yes, that paragraph deserves its own page.
The reverse holds too. Don't split one service into three thin pages to raise the count. A thin page about something you barely do ranks for nothing and still has to be kept up. Six thorough pages beat twelve shallow ones, which is also why a FAQ page does so much for its size: it's dense with real answers.
The pages that quietly cost you
Every page carries an ongoing cost, and it isn't the build. It's staying true. Six months after launch a price has moved, a service has been dropped, someone on the team has left, and nothing on the site says so.
The worst offenders are the ones nobody thinks about: "Our Process", "Why Choose Us", a news page whose newest item is two years old. That last one suggests the business itself might be gone. How often you should update your website covers the rhythm that prevents it.
The honest rule: if you wouldn't notice a page being wrong for six months, delete it.
What this looks like in Helm
In Helm, the pages and sections of your site are fixed when it's built, and you edit the content inside them. You don't add or remove pages from the dashboard; that happens on the build side, as a deliberate change to the site.
It sounds like a restriction. In practice it prevents the sprawl this article is about: sites grow because adding a page is easy and deleting one is a decision nobody wants to make. A structure decided with whoever builds the site, and then held, keeps the shape it was designed with. When the business really changes, a new section is added as a considered change.
What you control is everything inside those pages: text, images, prices, and repeating items such as services or menu entries, in each language your site is built in. Change a price, press Go Live, and your site shows it. That's the part that decides whether your six good pages stay true.
The short version
Count jobs, not pages, and most small businesses land at five to nine. Give each service its own thorough page, skip the thin ones, and delete anything you wouldn't notice being wrong for six months.