How many pages does a company website need?
Key takeaways
- The number of pages follows from your offer, not from a recommendation. The formula for it is simple.
- A typical mid-sized company ends up with twelve to twenty pages, not five and not a hundred.
- Every page without its own search intent is one page too many.
- Too few pages cost visibility, too many cost maintenance time and dilute the structure.
The formula
The number of pages is not a matter of taste. It follows from what you sell:
6 core pages: home, about us, case studies, contact, legal notice, privacy policy.
+ 1 page per service that can be sold. Three services, three pages.
+ 1 page per target group that needs to be addressed differently. Only if language, examples and arguments really differ.
+ 1 page per location with its own team or its own catchment area.
+ content pages: blog, glossary, FAQ, depending on capacity.
Three services, two target groups, one location gives you: 6 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 12 pages. That is the foundation, before any content is built up.
The formula seems banal, but it prevents both typical mistakes: the five-page website that ranks for nothing, and the eighty-page one where nobody visits sixty of them.
The only number that counts
The number of pages is not a matter of taste. It follows from what you sell:
6 core pages: home, about us, case studies, contact, legal notice, privacy policy.
+ 1 page per service that can be sold. Three services, three pages.
+ 1 page per target group that needs to be addressed differently. Only if language, examples and arguments really differ.
+ 1 page per location with its own team or its own catchment area.
+ content pages: blog, glossary, FAQ, depending on capacity.
Three services, two target groups, one location gives you: 6 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 12 pages. That is the foundation, before any content is built up.
The formula seems banal, but it prevents both typical mistakes: the five-page website that ranks for nothing, and the eighty-page one where nobody visits sixty of them.
When a topic deserves its own page
The test is search intent. A dedicated page is worth it if someone searches for exactly this topic and expects a complete answer.
Own page: web design, SEO support, corporate design. Each has its own search volume, its own questions and its own buying signals.
No own page: our values, our philosophy, quality. Nobody searches for these. They are paragraphs on the about us page, not pages.
A second test: Could you send this page in a conversation as the answer to a question? If so, it is justified. If not, it is self-promotion.
The third: Does the page have its own title under 60 characters that contains a real search term? If you can't phrase one, the topic is missing.
What too few pages cost
The five-page website is common and often looks good. It has three structural disadvantages.
It can only rank for a few terms. A page ranks well for one topic. A services page with five services doesn't rank properly for any of them, because no term appears consistently in the title, heading and copy.
It can't go into depth. If you pack everything onto one page, you have to keep every topic short. But in B2B, it is exactly the details that decide whether someone sends an inquiry.
It has nothing to link to. Internal linking needs destinations. With five pages, there is nothing to connect.
On top of that comes the point that has become more important since AI answers: systems cite the page that answers a question completely. A catch-all page answers five questions halfway.
What too many pages cost
The other extreme usually develops over years: a page for every campaign, a subpage for every topic, old landing pages that were never deleted.
Maintenance effort. Every page has to stay up to date. Eighty pages means eighty places where an outdated phone number or an old pricing example can sit.
Diluted topics. If three pages cover the same topic, they compete against each other in search. Google picks one, and rarely the one you want.
Lost click paths. Anything four clicks away from the homepage is neither found nor crawled.
A simple test: sort your pages by views over the last twelve months. Everything under twenty views a year needs to be reviewed: merge, revise or redirect.
How to turn many pages into a few good ones
Cleaning up is usually more valuable than rebuilding. An approach that works:
Step 1: List all URLs, with views and search terms from Search Console.
Step 2: Make three piles, namely carries weight (brings visitors or inquiries), could carry weight (good topic, bad copy), doesn't carry weight.
Step 3: The third pile gets merged or redirected, not deleted. A 301 redirect to the closest related page keeps the visibility you have built up.
Step 4: The second pile gets revised, not replaced. An existing URL with a history is worth more than a new one.
Important: deleting without a replacement and without a redirect is the only step that can really do damage. Everything else can be corrected.
The structure that grows with you
If you have twelve pages today and want thirty in three years, you should define the order now.
Three levels are enough for almost any company: homepage, section, detail page. So /leistungen/webdesign instead of /leistungen/digital/web/webdesign.
The URL should name the content and never change again. Changing a URL costs visibility, even with a redirect. So no years, no campaign names, no internal abbreviations.
An often overlooked point: plan from the start where content will live that doesn't exist yet. If the blog comes later, /blog should be reserved today, and not end up as a subpage of /aktuelles/news/blog.
That costs half an hour in planning and saves you a move later on.
More articles
