The eight core pages most operators need
Most small-business sites we build land on eight to thirteen pages. Below the eight-page mark, the site usually feels thin — the visitor can't find what they came for. Above thirteen, the site usually has bloat — pages no one visits that drag down the SEO of the pages that matter.
Page one: home. The audience-named hero, the trust-stack (reviews, years in business, named clients), and the path into the rest of the site. The home page is doing the work of self-selecting visitors who fit your operation from visitors who don't.
Page two: about (or studio, or our story). Who you are, why you started, the real founder photo. The about page is read by the prospect who already wants to hire you and is looking for a reason to feel comfortable. Make it specific.
Pages three through six: services. One page per primary service you offer. Each one ranks separately in Google. Each one answers the question "can you do X" with real specifics.
Pages seven and eight: contact and pricing. Contact is the form, the phone, the address, the map. Pricing — if you'll show it — is the page that closes the prospect who's been silently price-anchoring against you across three competitor sites.
Pages worth adding if they fit your operation
Work / case studies / portfolio. If your business benefits from proof — design, trades, consulting, real estate — a work page is mandatory. If your business sells a commodity service, it's optional.
FAQ. Best place to handle the eight to twelve questions every prospect asks before signing. Saves you from answering them on the phone.
Team / staff. Builds trust for professional services (financial, legal, healthcare, accounting). Less critical for trades or retail.
Service area / locations. If you serve multiple cities or counties, one page per area. This is where the SEO traffic for service-area searches actually lives.
Blog / news / journal. Only worth it if you'll actually publish on a real cadence. An abandoned blog with five posts from 2022 reads as worse than no blog at all.
Pages that almost never earn their keep
Mission and values pages. No one reads them. They sit at the bottom of the nav and get zero traffic. If your values matter, work them into the about page.
Awards and certifications pages. Belong as a strip on the home page, not a dedicated page. A page nobody navigates to doesn't sell anything.
Press / media pages. Worth it only if you're regularly getting press; otherwise it's three stale logos collecting dust.
Login / portal pages without a real product behind them. "Coming soon" portals make the site look unfinished. Either ship the portal or remove the link.
The decision framework
Three questions per candidate page: Does it answer a specific question a real prospect would type into Google? Does it close a sale that no other page on the site can close? Will I update it in the next twelve months?
Two yeses out of three — ship the page. One yes — leave it off; revisit if the operation grows into needing it. No yeses — definitely leave it off.
Most operators come to us wanting fifteen pages and leave with eleven. The ones we cut are always the ones the operator gets attached to during scoping but no one would have visited.