- How many pages should my simple website have?
- 2010-02-03: Many web developers charge per web page and certainly for a simple website that seems the simplest way forward. My advantage over those providers is they usually want you to provide the photographs and the text, whereas I'll do both those too. That's necessary because you probably don't know which keyphrases would be best to weave into each page text .. that's where my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) skills come in.
- But if we're charging per page, how many pages should you have? A single page website can be perfectly serviceable. So why would you want to break that up into multiple pages if it costs more?
- Clearly businesses grow and at some point it becomes clear they need more than one page, so, when it's needed, it's needed.
- But I thought I'd share some data with you from a client who went from one page to eight last week. As you might expect the pageviews has rocketed 305%, that's obvious since previously there was only one page to view, so no marks there. Same with Pages/Visit. But the bounce rate has gone from 74% (ie. 3/4 visitors left immediately) to 22.6% (ie. only 1/4 of visitors now leave immediately). So whereas before we'd only engage 26 out of every 100 visitors, now we are engaging 77. That feels like 3 times the chance of making a sale to me.
- The average time on the site has gone up 578%. People are engaging with the site now. That means there's more time for people to hear our message.
- Another advantage of breaking up the business into separate elements is that we can see which is the most popular. If we had a (silly example) one-page farm site we wouldn't know a lot about our visitors, but if we broke it up into pages on cows, pigs, and sheep, and people visited the sheep page the most, we'd learn something about what people are interested in. That could inform our future marketing.
- Of course there are SEO advantages too. Our cow page should attract cow-liking visitors by being higher for cow searches than our former 'farm' page.
- This client's traffic is unchanged. That's because there hasn't been enough time for Google to spot the change and reflect the changes. Anyway, often site changes mean your rankings dip momentarily before appearing again in the new slot. So when I know about the traffic gains, I'll let you know.
- So .. multiple pages? Let's say a single page website would have cost this person £300 while the eight page website would be £1,000. Without considering the traffic effects, we are more or less saying for three times the price, you'll have a website that will engage three times the visitors. Add-in the undoubted traffic effect (let's imagine it might double the traffic), and it starts to look very worthwhile building those extra pages if you can afford it.
- The thing about a website is that it's not set in stone. It's not like a brochure. So if money's tight, set a budget, even if it's just £100 a month. After three months you'd have your first page, and we can add a new page every month. In the end, you'll see the benefits in terms of sales and we can go faster.
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