One-page websites, and when they work

When one page is genuinely enough

One service, one audience, one area. A mobile trade with a single offer, a professional with one specialty, a new business testing whether there is demand before investing further.

It is also enough when the site is not the main route to customers. A business that gets work through referral needs a page that confirms it is real and makes contact easy, and little more.

And it is far better than nothing. An unfinished five-page site helps nobody, while one honest complete page does the job for a great many small businesses.

What a one-page site cannot do

Rank for several different subjects. A page is understood as being about one thing, so a page covering plumbing, heating and drainage competes with itself for all three.

Answer questions in depth. Everything has to be compressed to fit, which means the detailed answers that make a business findable for specific questions never get written.

And grow gracefully. Adding a fourth service to a page that already carries three makes every section worse, which is the point at which most one-page sites need rebuilding entirely.

How to build one that can grow

Structure it as sections that could become pages later. One subject per section, a real heading on each, and content that would make sense if lifted out on its own.

Then the growth path is mechanical. A section becomes a page, the page gets expanded, and the original section becomes a short summary linking to it. Nothing is rewritten from scratch.

Keep the addresses sensible from the start. Our page on address structure covers why, and a one-page site that has to change its address later loses whatever it had accumulated.

What the single page must contain

The list below is the minimum for a page that works as a whole website. Each item answers a question a visitor has, and a page missing more than one of them will lose people.

• What you do, in the first lines, in plain words
• Who it is for and where you work
• What it costs, or what determines the cost
• Proof that the work is real, with photographs
• What happens after somebody makes contact
• A contact route that works on a phone
• Enough detail that nobody has to guess

The search reality

A single page can rank for the one thing it is about, and be quoted by an answer engine for it, including the business name and the main service in your area. That is a real result and it is often enough for a referral-led business.

It will not rank for the long tail of specific questions, because those answers do not exist anywhere on the site. Our page on specific searches covers what that traffic looks like.

So the honest position is that a one-page site is a decision to compete on fewer subjects. For some businesses that is correct, and it should be a decision rather than an accident.

When to add the second page

When you have a second distinct service, a second area, or a question customers keep asking that deserves more than a paragraph. Any of the three is a reasonable trigger.

Start with the page that earns money rather than the blog. A second page that describes a service properly does more than ten educational posts written before the offer is clear.

Our page on site structure covers the wider question, including why page count on its own is a poor target.

Common mistakes

Hiding everything behind smooth scrolling and animation. A page that reveals its content through motion can be unreadable to anything that does not run scripts, and awkward for some visitors.

Skipping heading structure because it is one page. Headings still carry meaning, levels still have to be in order, and our page on heading structure applies identically.

And leaving out the boring facts. Hours, area, what happens next. A single page has no room to waste, and the practical details are what actually produce a call.