How Many Pages Should a Website Have?
There is no magic number, but there is a rule: one page for every distinct thing someone searches for. Here is the core set every Australian small business needs, when extra pages help, and when they get you into trouble.
There is no magic number. The working rule is one page for every distinct thing a person might search for, which for most Australian small businesses lands between 8 and 15 pages: home, about, contact, one page per service, one per area you genuinely work in, and a privacy policy. Most sites we are asked to fix are too small, not too big.
What pages does every small business website need?
Six things. Everything after that is optional and should earn its place. You need a home page that makes it obvious what you do and where you do it, an about page with real faces and a real history on it, a contact page carrying a phone number and a form (and a street address if you have one customers can visit), one page for each service you actually sell, a privacy policy because your contact form collects personal information, and location pages if you work across more than one area.
That is the skeleton. A one service sole trader can be genuinely finished at six or seven pages and there is nothing embarrassing about that. A five service trade business across four suburbs is looking at closer to twenty, and that is not bloat, it is coverage.
The pages that usually deserve to be added next, in rough order of how often they pay for themselves: a pricing or how we charge page, a work samples page, and a frequently asked questions page. Pricing is the one people resist hardest and regret skipping. If you will not talk about money on your site, a decent share of your enquiries will be people who were never going to afford you, and you will burn hours finding that out on the phone.
Why does splitting one services page into several usually work better?
Because a page about eight things is not really about anything, and Google treats it that way. If you sell switchboard upgrades, house rewiring, ceiling fan installation and EV charger installation, and all four sit as subheadings on a single Our Services page, that page has to compete against four pages that each do only one job. It loses. Give each service its own page and you have four shots instead of one.
The lift is not only in rankings. Somebody who searches for EV charger installation and lands on a page devoted to it, with photos of your work, the wall box brands you fit and what an install typically costs, is a much warmer enquiry than someone who hits a wall of text and has to scroll to find their thing. The split is one of the cheaper changes with a visible effect, and it usually shows up in enquiries before it shows up in rankings.
The catch: only split where the pages can genuinely differ. Four service pages that share the same 400 words with the service name swapped are worse than the one combined page you started with. If you cannot write 500 to 800 useful words about a service (what is involved, what it costs, how long it takes, what goes wrong, who it suits), it probably belongs as a section on a broader page rather than a page of its own. This is a large part of what we are doing when we plan a new website build: working out which services carry enough weight to stand alone.
| Business type | Recommended page structure | Approximate count |
|---|---|---|
| Sole trader consultant, one core service, one city | Home, about, one or two service pages, contact, privacy policy | 5 to 7 |
| Local trade, four services, one service area | Home, about, four service pages, reviews, contact, privacy policy | 9 to 11 |
| Trade or service business, five services, four or five suburbs | Home, about, five service pages, four or five location pages, case studies, contact, privacy policy | 15 to 20 |
| Professional services firm (legal, accounting, finance) | Home, about, team bios, one page per practice area, insights or articles, fees, contact, privacy policy, website terms | 20 to 40 |
| Allied health or medical clinic | Home, about, practitioner pages, one page per condition or treatment, fees and health funds, bookings, contact, privacy policy | 15 to 30 |
| Online store | Home, about, category pages, one page per product, shipping, returns and refunds, website terms, privacy policy, contact | 20 to several thousand |
Should you build a page for every suburb you serve?
Only for the areas where you can say something true and specific. A page for Parramatta that mentions three jobs you have actually done there, the reviews from customers in that postcode, your travel time from the depot and the local quirks (older housing stock, strata rules, council parking) is a real page. A page for Parramatta that is the Blacktown page with the suburb name swapped is a doorway page, and Google names doorway pages in its spam policies for a reason.
The failure mode is predictable. Someone sells a tradie a package of sixty suburb pages, they rank for nothing much, and eighteen months later the site carries sixty pages of near duplicate text dragging on everything else. Pruning them back to five or six genuine ones usually improves matters rather than hurting.
If local visibility is the goal, your Google Business Profile does more work than any number of thin suburb pages. Get the profile complete, get reviews flowing steadily, keep the categories tight, and then build three to six real location pages for the areas you actually want more work in. That combination beats a page farm every time, and it does not put you a policy update away from losing your rankings.
The find and replace test. Open a location page, swap every mention of the suburb for a different one, and read it again. If it still makes perfect sense, it is a doorway page and it is not going to rank. A real location page breaks when you do that, because it contains things that are only true about that place.
Is a blog actually worth having?
Sometimes. A blog is worth it if you will answer the questions customers genuinely ask you, at a steady rate, for at least a year. It is not worth it if you are going to post four times and stop. A blog whose most recent article is dated 2019 is a live signal to every visitor that nobody is minding the shop, and we would rather see no blog at all than that.
The version that works is boring and effective: take the questions you answer on the phone every week, and give each one a page. How much does a switchboard upgrade cost in Sydney. Do I need council approval. Those pages pull in people who are already part way to buying, and they double as something you can send a prospect mid quote. One or two a month is plenty.
What wastes money is generic filler with no buying intent behind it. Five tips for spring cleaning your gutters will not bring you a roofing job. Professional services, healthcare and finance get the most out of publishing because their buyers research heavily before they call. A scrap metal operator, honestly, does not need a blog. If you are unsure, skip it at launch, spend the budget on making the service pages properly good, and add articles later once the site is earning.
What legal pages does an Australian business website need?
At minimum, a privacy policy if you collect any personal information, and a contact form or email signup counts. Under the Privacy Act 1988 there is a small business exemption for organisations turning over $3 million or less, but it comes with carve outs (health service providers are covered regardless of size, as are businesses that trade in personal information) and it has been under review for years. Beyond the legal question, Google Ads and most payment providers expect a privacy policy to exist, and buyers in legal, finance and health notice when one does not.
Website terms of use are worth having once your site does anything beyond describe your business: user accounts, downloads, quotes, bookings. If you sell online, you need a returns and refunds policy that sits properly alongside Australian Consumer Law. Consumer guarantees cannot be contracted out of, so a blunt No Refunds notice is not just unenforceable, it can itself breach the law, and the ACCC has taken action over exactly that wording. Say clearly what you do for change of mind (which you are not obliged to accept) and separate it from faulty or misdescribed goods (which you are).
If you email marketing to a list, the Spam Act 2003 requires consent, clear sender identification and a working unsubscribe. That is mostly about how you handle the list, but it shapes what your signup form and privacy policy need to say. Add a shipping and delivery page if you post goods, and an accessibility statement if you have made the effort, which more Australian businesses are being asked about in tenders.
None of this is legal advice, and we are not the people to write your terms. Generators are fine for a privacy policy on a simple brochure site; if you handle health records, financial data or take payments, pay a solicitor for the real thing. It is a few hundred dollars against a risk that is much larger.
Do more pages always mean better rankings?
No. Twelve pages that each answer a real question outperform sixty that repeat each other, and it is not close. Page count is a by-product of covering your market properly, not a target to chase. Nobody at Google is counting.
There is a real cost to every page you add. It has to be built, which on most quotes runs $150 to $400 excluding GST for an extra template page. It has to be kept accurate, because a page listing a service you dropped in 2023 does more damage than the traffic it brings. And every page competes for the internal links and attention you have to give. Fifteen pages you maintain will beat fifty you have forgotten about.
Our usual approach is to launch lean and grow deliberately: get the core set right, publish, then add a page whenever there is a specific search or a specific question driving it. That is cheaper than paying for pages nobody asked for, and it means each new page is built with evidence behind it. If you are weighing up what to include, the planning stage of a website design and build is where that decision should be made, not after the fact. There is more on scoping and structure across our website guides in the Knowledge Centre.
One last thing worth saying plainly: nobody can guarantee that adding pages will lift your rankings, and anyone promising a position for a given keyword is selling something they cannot deliver. What extra pages reliably do is give a buyer more places to find the exact thing they were after. That is a good bet, but only when the pages are worth landing on.
Common questions
Does a bigger website rank better than a smaller one?
Not by itself. Size correlates with rankings mostly because bigger sites tend to cover more topics, not because page count is a ranking factor. A ten page site that answers ten questions thoroughly will beat a hundred page site of thin, overlapping content. The useful way to think about it: every page is a chance to match a search. Adding pages helps only when each one matches something new.
How many words should each page have?
Enough to answer the question and no more. Service pages generally need 500 to 900 words to cover what is involved, what it costs, how long it takes and who it suits. Home and about pages often work better shorter. Comparison and cost pages tend to run 1,200 words plus because buyers read them properly. If you are padding to hit a number, stop; thin padding reads worse to a customer than a short honest page.
Can I add pages after the site is built, and what does it cost?
Yes, and you should plan on it. On a WordPress site built with reusable templates, adding a page you write yourself costs nothing but your time. Having it written, laid out and internally linked usually runs $150 to $400 excluding GST per page depending on length and images. Ask before you sign whether new pages will need a developer or whether you can do them yourself, because the answer varies a lot between builders.
Should service pages sit in a folder or at the top level?
Either works, and the difference is smaller than people think. A structure like /services/switchboard-upgrades/ groups things sensibly and makes your navigation obvious, which helps humans more than crawlers. Top level URLs are shorter and fine too. What matters much more is that the page is linked from your main menu and from related pages. An orphan page with a beautiful URL still gets ignored.
Do I need separate landing pages for Google Ads?
Often yes, if the ad promises something specific. An ad group for emergency after hours plumbing converts better against a page about emergency after hours plumbing than against a general plumbing page. These pages can be excluded from your navigation but should not be hidden from Google, and they must match what the ad said or your quality score suffers. Two or three well matched pages beat a dozen half done ones.
Should I delete old pages that get no traffic?
Review them rather than deleting on reflex. A page with no traffic may still be the one a prospect reads before they call, and analytics rarely shows that clearly. Delete pages that are inaccurate, duplicated or embarrassing, and redirect the URL to the closest relevant page so you do not create a dead end. Merging several weak pages into one strong one is usually the better move.
Not sure how many pages your site actually needs?
Tell us what you sell and where you sell it, and we will map out a page structure that covers your market without padding it. Sydney based, building and maintaining websites for Australian businesses since 2004.