Why You Don’t Want a One Page Website

websiteWhen the time comes to build a new website or redesign an existing one, you’re going to have to make some big decisions. Your website is your primary selling point, your storefront, and your identity all in one, so you want to make sure you’re doing everything right to see the best results.

One of the biggest decisions – one that will affect the entirety of the website – is the decision between building around a single landing page or creating a full-fledged site with interior pages. Some believe that a single page will look better, simplify the user experience, and cut down on development time and costs. However, it also comes with some pretty significant disadvantages!

Worse for SEO

If you want your website to be successful, you need traffic. SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website so that it can be easily read by Google, allowing it to be ranked higher on the search results & easier to find for visitors.

A single-page website has 2 major downsides when it comes to SEO:

Speed – How fast your website loads plays a major role in your Google ranking. Google wants its users to have the best experience possible from the sites it links to, so if your page takes more than a few seconds to load, you’re at a disadvantage.

A single-page website will often be long and contain a lot of images, text, and other elements that need to be loaded. Piling that all into one webpage means that there is a lot of data that needs to be loaded just to reach your homepage, leading to longer load times (and a bad first impression!).

Keyword Optimization – When a user searches something on Google (the keyword), the search engine checks your site’s titles, meta tags, and web content for those terms to gauge the relevance of your page as a search result. Each page has its own set of these tags, so using a single page only gives you 1 set of title and meta tags, hurting your ability to rank for more keywords.

Harder to Sell Yourself

One of the biggest reasons people use landing pages for their sites is to give an overview of all the important information, linking off to the specific pages for more information. However, if you’re using a single-page website with no interior pages, you’ll need to include all the information right there on the landing page. That means someone has to navigate their way through the page to find the content they’re seeking. If you choose to keep it concise for a better user experience, you’re risking not giving yourself enough content to sell yourself with.

In the end, while choosing to create a single-page website won’t kill your business, it may hurt your credibility in the eyes of Google and your potential customers.

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