Websites tend to grow by addition. A new service gets a page. A campaign gets a landing page. A question from sales becomes another FAQ. A few years later, there are hundreds of pages and nobody is sure which ones matter.
More pages feel like more coverage. In practice, they often mean more places for visitors to get lost.
The cost of too many pages
- Visitors can’t find the path. When five pages say roughly the same thing, people stop reading and leave.
- Search engines get mixed signals. Similar pages compete with each other instead of one page being clearly the best answer.
- Nothing gets maintained. Outdated pages quietly undermine trust in the ones that are current.
A smaller website where every page has a clear job will almost always outperform a larger one where most pages don’t.
What makes a page better
A better page knows exactly who it is for and what it should help them do next. It answers their real questions, in the order they would ask them, and makes the next step obvious.
That usually means fewer pages, each doing more: combining thin pages into one strong one, cutting what no longer reflects the business, and putting effort into the handful of pages that most visitors actually see.
A simple audit
- Pull a list of every page and how many people visited it in the last six months.
- For each page, write one sentence: who is it for, and what should they do after reading it?
- Merge, rewrite or remove anything you can’t write that sentence for.
It is rarely the most exciting website project. It is often the most effective one.