Web Design
When a one-page site is genuinely enough
Sometimes the right answer is one page and a phone number. Here is how to tell, and what it costs you in search.
Not every business needs eight pages. A single well-made page can outperform a sprawling site, and it costs a fraction to build and maintain. It also has a specific, measurable cost in search that you should understand before choosing it.
When one page is right
- You sell one thing to one kind of customer.
- Most enquiries come from referral, social or advertising rather than search.
- You are validating something and will rebuild in a year anyway.
- Nobody will maintain a larger site, so the extra pages would go stale.
When it is a mistake
- You want to rank for several different services. Each service needs its own page to rank for its own terms — this is the main cost of a one-pager and it is not small.
- You publish anything regularly.
- You serve distinct audiences who need different arguments.
- You need case studies with their own URLs to send to prospects.
What a good one-pager contains
The same structure as a good homepage, ordered as a conversation: what it is, who it is for, proof, what you offer, how it works, what it costs or roughly costs, objections answered, and the action — repeated three times, because people decide at different points.
Do not skip the legal pages
One page for the content does not mean one page in total. In Germany an Impressum and a privacy policy are mandatory and must be reachable in two clicks from anywhere. They can be separate pages; they cannot be omitted.
Build it so it can grow
Use a CMS even for one page. The day you want a second page — and most businesses do within eighteen months — you want to add it, not start again. A one-pager built as a hand-coded static file is cheap now and a rebuild later.
Working on something like this?
Tell us what you are building — we reply to every enquiry.