From time to time, I want to learn about some business. So I’ll open their website, and more often than I’d expect, the website won’t really explain what they do. Making matters worse, it might have a whole bunch of sub-pages, each explaining some small part of what they offer. Yet not a single page gives me a decent overview of the business as a whole.

That’s a problem, because people generally don’t spend much time trying to figure a website out. Jakob Nielsen describes this early decision to stay or leave based on research into page-visit durations. His point isn’t that nobody reads long pages. It’s that people need to see why a page is worth their time before they’ll spend much of it there.

For a small service business, I think a good company website basically has to do three things:

A) explain what the customer gets out of what you offer, or which problem you solve for them
B) give the customer a reason to believe that you can actually deliver it
C) make it easy to do what they came for, whether that’s finding your opening hours, checking a service or contacting you

That’s obviously not some scientific formula. It’s how I’d start thinking about a small business website.

The reality is that many individuals and small businesses don’t need a complicated website. In plenty of cases, one good landing page plus the legal pages you need is already enough. If someone can understand what you do, judge whether it fits their needs and find the practical information they need, I don’t think you owe them another five pages.

A category that often does this very well is personal and portfolio websites. Those usually have one main page, often look distinctly different from everything else, and that’s about it. Maybe add a blog and some legal stuff. The good ones still make it immediately clear who the person is, what they do, what they’ve done and how you can reach them. They manage to stand out without making the website itself difficult to understand.

And those two things are actually quite different. Google researchers found that people generally prefer websites with lower visual complexity and designs that roughly match what they already expect from that kind of website. They measured aesthetic judgments of screenshots, not whether a one-page site works better than a multi-page one. So you can absolutely make a website look distinctive without making its structure complicated.

Of course, sometimes you still need more pages. If you have several genuinely different services, different audiences, lots of information to explain or content that people specifically search for, splitting things up can make the website easier to understand. A restaurant menu or product documentation should have a direct link someone can share. And cramming absolutely everything onto one gigantic landing page isn’t simple either.

The point isn’t really to have as few pages as possible. It’s to have as much website as you actually need.

So whenever you build one, try to keep it simple. Start with what visitors need to understand and what they want to do. Then add things when they have an actual purpose.

Usually, that also means the website is faster to build, cheaper to maintain and easier to understand.