How many pages does a trade website actually need?

Cost & buying7 September 202612 min read

Short answer: count the things you actually sell, and the places you actually sell them, and the number falls out. Home, about and contact, plus one page for every service you want to be found for, plus one for every area you can say something real about. For most sole traders that is four to six pages. One page is genuinely enough for a business that does one thing in one town — there is no search penalty for being short. The limit is that a page can only be the best answer to one question.

Is a one-page website enough?

Often, yes, and the trade is talked out of it far too easily.

Consider a sole trader doing one thing — say a jet-washing and driveway-cleaning business — in one town, whose work arrives by word of mouth and a Business Profile. The website has exactly three jobs: prove the business is real, show the work, and give somebody a way to make contact without thinking about it. One page does all three perfectly well. It loads fast, there is nothing to navigate, and on a phone it is simply a scroll. Being sold six pages to hold the same amount of information is being sold padding.

The honest test is not size. It is whether every section of that one page would still be there if you were paying by the word. If it would, one page is right.

Is a one-page website bad for SEO? No — but here is the real limit

There is no penalty. Nothing demotes a site for having one page rather than nine. Anyone telling you Google dislikes one-page sites is telling you something they have not checked.

The genuine constraint is structural, and once you see it you can stop worrying about the myth. Search engines return pages, not websites — Google’s own account of how Search works describes indexing and ranking as operating on pages throughout. A page competes on how completely it answers one particular question. So a single page can be an outstanding answer to “driveway cleaning in Faversham”. It cannot simultaneously be the outstanding answer to “driveway cleaning”, “roof moss removal”, “gutter clearing” and “patio sealing”, because to do that it would have to be four pages of writing crammed into one, and every one of those subjects would be diluted by the other three.

That is the whole argument for more pages, and it is worth noticing what it is not. It is not that more pages rank better. It is that more things you want to be found for need more places to say them properly. If you only want to be found for one thing, none of this applies to you. What does apply, whatever your page count, is whether the site is being indexed at all — the reasons a new site does not show up on Google are a different problem from this one and worth separating.

The arithmetic: services × places, plus the fixed three

Work it out on the back of a delivery note. Three parts.

The fixed set

Home, about, contact. Three pages, always, whatever size the business is. About is not vanity — it is where a nervous customer checks that you are a real firm with a real base, and it does more work than most trades expect.

One page per service you want to be found for

Not per service you offer. Per service you want the phone to ring about. A roofer who does flat roofs, pitched roofs, leadwork and guttering has four, if all four are work worth having. If leadwork is one job a year and you would rather not do it, it is a paragraph on another page, not a page.

One page per area you can say something real about

This is the one that goes wrong. More on it below, because it is where most page counts get inflated by suppliers and where most of the value gets destroyed.

Add them up. A sole trader with two services in one town: five. A small firm with four services and three towns: ten. An established firm with ten services and eight areas: twenty-one, which in practice becomes twenty because two of the services turn out to be the same service described differently.

Two worked examples, all the way to a number

A two-service firm in one town

A plasterer working out of Sittingbourne. Two things worth having: plastering and rendering. One town he actually works in, plus the surrounding villages he would happily travel to but has no jobs in yet.

Fixed three, plus two service pages, plus one genuine area page for Sittingbourne. Six pages. The surrounding villages are a line on the contact page saying how far he travels — not five invented area pages. If money were tight he could drop to five by folding the area content into the home page, and lose very little.

A five-service firm across four towns

A roofing company: flat roofing, pitched roofing and re-roofs, leadwork, guttering and fascias, and emergency repairs. Real, evidenced work in Maidstone, Ashford, Medway and Canterbury.

Fixed three, plus five service pages, plus four area pages. Twelve pages — which is why that firm is looking at the ten-page tier and having a conversation about the extra two, not at the five-page one. Note what did not happen: nobody multiplied five services by four towns to get twenty “flat roofing in Ashford” pages. That is the failure mode below, and it is the most expensive mistake in this whole subject. The trade-specific version of the same reasoning is in what a roofing website has to do.

What a service page has to contain to be worth having

A page earns its place by answering the questions a customer has about that job and no other. If it cannot do the following, it is not a page — it is a heading:

• What the job actually involves, in the order it happens.
• How long it typically takes, and what makes it take longer.
• What it depends on — access, weather, the state of what is already there.
• Photographs of that specific job type, finished, on real properties.
• The two or three questions people always ask you about it on the phone, answered.
• What you do about the mess, and what happens if something goes wrong.

That is four hundred words without trying. A page that cannot reach it is a page with nothing in it, and nothing in it is worse than not existing — because it splits your own site’s attention between a good page and a thin one.

Twenty thin pages lose to six real ones

The commonest bad outcome in trade web design is not too few pages. It is a site with twenty-odd pages, most of them the same four paragraphs with a service or a town name swapped, sold on the reasoning that more pages means more chances to be found.

It does not work, and it is not a grey area. Google’s spam policies name this directly as scaled content abuse — many pages generated primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help anyone, explicitly including content produced by “automated transformations like synonymizing” where little value is provided. A page-per-town template with the town substituted is a textbook description of that.

The practical damage arrives before any of that, though. Twenty thin pages make the site worse to read, harder to keep current, and quietly embarrassing when a customer clicks the page for the town you have never worked in and finds three sentences. Six real pages beat twenty thin ones on every measure that matters, including the one the thin pages were supposed to win.

Why one page per service beats one page listing services

A services page listing eight things gives each of them two sentences. Two sentences cannot answer what a customer wants to know about that job — what is involved, how long it takes, what it depends on, what it looks like when finished, what goes wrong and how you deal with it. And a page that says two sentences about eight things is not the best answer to any of the eight searches.

Split it, and each page can carry the photographs of that particular job, the specific questions people ask about it, and the specific reassurances that matter for it. Nothing about that is a search trick. It is simply that a page about one thing can be good, and a page about eight things cannot.

The honest limit of that argument: it stops working the moment you run out of things to say. Eight service pages that all say roughly the same thing with the noun swapped are worse than one good services page — they compete with each other, they read as filler to a human, and they make the site look bigger than the business. If you cannot write four hundred genuinely different words about a service, it does not get a page.

Area pages, and the version that is worth less than nothing

Area pages are the most abused unit in trade web design. The abusive version is a template with the town name substituted: “Looking for a reliable roofer in Sittingbourne? We are the leading roofer in Sittingbourne…” repeated across forty towns. It is quick to produce, which is why it gets sold, and it is worth less than nothing, for the reasons set out above.

A real area page has things in it that could only be about that place: jobs you have actually done there, the housing stock and what that means for the work, how far it is from your base and what that does to your response time, where you park. If you have never worked in a town, you do not have an area page for it — you have a lie with a postcode on it.

The practical rule: an area page per place you genuinely work and can evidence. Three real ones beat thirty invented ones, and the honest way to cover the rest is a single coverage map or list. The wider question of how local search actually decides who appears is a separate subject — getting found in Kent and how Maps results are decided cover it properly, and neither is solved by adding pages.

When to add a page, and when not to

Add one when all three are true:

• It is work you actively want more of.
• You could write four hundred words about it that are true only of it.
• Somebody would plausibly search for that thing by name.

Do not add one when:

• It is a service you would rather subcontract.
• The page would be the same as an existing page with a word changed.
• It exists to make the site look bigger.
• It is a town you have never worked in. This is the one to be firm about — the temptation is enormous and the return is negative.

So where do the tiers come from?

Ours are five, ten, twenty and thirty-plus, and they exist because that is roughly where the arithmetic above lands for the four sizes of trade business we see. Five is a sole trader with a service or two. Ten is a small firm — four services, three areas, plus the fixed three. Twenty is an established firm with ten services and eight areas. Above that you are usually running multiple trading locations, and the site needs a different structure rather than just more of the same pages.

That is the right way round to read a package: the count is a description of a common answer, not a target to fill. Buying ten pages and having six things to say produces a site with four bad pages on it. What each band actually includes is set out in what is included in a £700 website, and the price-band survey more generally in what a tradesman’s website should cost.

Where we stand on this

We publish page counts against prices — £700 for up to five, £1,500 for up to ten, £3,000 for up to twenty, all excluding VAT, all on the pricing section — and we would rather build you a four-page site at the five-page price than pad it. A site with nothing spare in it is easier to keep current, and keeping it current is most of what stops a website quietly going stale, which is the failure described in why an old website stops bringing in work.

If you are not sure whether you are a five-page business or a twelve-page one, the Growth Diagnostic asks five questions and will give you a view — including, sometimes, that the pages are not the problem.

What we cannot tell you is that any particular number of pages will get you found. More pages is not more traffic. It is only more places to be right, and only if there is something true to put on them.

Questions people also ask