How many pages should a website have
How many pages should a website have?
In this post we are going to discuss the importance of reducing the number of pages in your website design. In a minimalist website strategy, you always want to reduce the amount of choice that you offer to your site visitors. The number of pages in a website is no exception to this. As a rule - stick to between 3 to 6 pages, but absolutely no more than this. But how do you determine how many pages your website should have? You need to decide on your website goals & roadmap .. more on this soon.
Let’s talk Minimalism! Let's talk about reduced clutter! Let’s talk about less choice!
We have written another post on why less is always more, check it out here - Why minimal and clean web designs convert better.
It’s all in the Psychology
We’re not just making things up. Promise. There is a famous study called the Jam Experiment, which was conducted by psychologists and the purpose of it was to look at how consumers react to the amount of choice presented to them.
Question ..
You arrive at a market with two stalls, both selling beautiful, homemade and delicious jars of jam.
The difference is, one is selling 24 types, the other is selling only 6 types. Which one would you go to? (It’s not a trick question .. just answer honestly).
You probably went with the stall selling 24 types of flavours? If this is the case, then don’t fret because this is what a majority of consumers would probably do.
However … and there is a big ‘BUT’ here. It has been found that those stalls selling a large choice of products, end up selling less. It was found that the more choice consumers are presented with, the more they feel overwhelmed and pressured to make a good decision. After all, nobody likes regrets … right?
The Jam Experiment showed that 30% of the people bought a jar from the stall only 6 types of flavours in comparison with 3% from the stall selling 24 choices. That’s ten times more!
Important Pages
Remember, a minimal website should include between 3 to 6 pages. This may sound easy enough, but when you start to add to your list it very quickly adds up. So how do you decide?
As an entrepreneur or business, you need to become sure of what your website goals are before you can decide what pages to keep and which to avoid. Also, what is right for one business, may not be applicable for another.
You want to do two things right at the beginning of the website design process:
Define your website goal(s)
Define your website roadmap
Website Goals
What is the ultimate goal (unless you have a couple) from building your website for your business? Some examples are below:
Sell a physical or digital product
Sell a professional service
Grow your email list
Increase podcast or YouTube subscribers
Grow a community
Based on this and the type of industry or business that you are in, you can begin to define what is important to keep on your website. Such as:
Selling a product; Product Page(s)
Growing your email list; Subscription Page
Example Time
If you’re an ecommerce business, you won’t necessarily be concerned with an About page. This is because as an ecommerce business selling digital or physical products, an About page is unlikely to help you sell more. Whereas the product page(s) is the most significant for you.
Similarly if you’re a website design business, again, an About page may be a little irrelevant to selling more of your services or gaining more clients. Whereas the Pricing, Portfolio and Contact pages are the ones that will help do the selling.
If an ‘About’ page is really that important for you to keep .. we’ll explain in a second where on your website you can leave this.
Website Roadmap
This is the route that you want your visitors to take. From point A to Z, i.e. from the Homepage to the page where your visitor decides to engage with your business and get offline. Yes … you want them offline!
We have written a whole other blog post on how to build your website roadmap!
The best way to present your roadmap to your visitors, will be to include these important pages within your primary navigation (link to our other post here!).
A well thought out roadmap on your primary navigation may look something like this:
Homepage > Services > Pricing > Contact Us
This roadmap provides the visitor with the essential information that they need to decide to either contact you, or book your service.
A cluttered roadmap may look something like this:
Homepage > About Us > Services > Pricing > Blog > Contact Us
This roadmap waffles a little bit, distracting the prospective client from getting in touch, and rather leading them onto reading more about you, or on your blog posts instead. The last thing you want to do is let a visitor rely on their memory and hope that they remember to get back on track to contact you.
Footer navigation; showing the number of pages a website should have
Minimal Route
It isn’t about providing as few clicks as possible to get to the end goal, but instead it is about providing a clear, directed and logical route to the page that will lead to sales or client contact.
For this reason and by keeping the number of pages very limited, you’re getting rid of unwanted content and keeping your website to the point. However, and be careful of this, this doesn’t mean to start cluttering the pages that you DO have, with too much content either!
Minimalism isn’t just about keeping it clean and concise, but what effect that has on people, and so is about improving the user experience. In fact, making the user experience a fantastic one!
Less Important Pages
If you find it necessary to keep certain pages such as your Blog, Awards, Testimonials, About, etc, then you can always move them to the footer (navigation) of your website.
The primary navigation should be kept for pages that are intended to lead to your site goal(s), and therefore are the most important pages.
Free Workbook
For if you’re truly interested in creating a minimal website for your business ….
We have written a free 10 page workbook on how to design a minimalist website. This is ready for you to download below and enjoy!
These are the basic and most fundamental principles in the very beginning stages of the design process.
Nothing to lose … plus more exciting and free content on the way!
