A furniture maker in Albuquerque came to me last spring with a spreadsheet of 42 pages he wanted his new website to have. One for every wood species. One for every joint. One for the sanding process, one for the finishing process, one for the delivery process. He had heard, somewhere, that more pages meant more SEO. He also had, in his own words, “no idea how I’m going to keep this thing current.”
We shipped the site with eleven pages. Two years later, it still ranks for the searches he actually wants to win, and he can update it in an afternoon.
The idea that a bigger website is a better website has been quietly wrong for a long time, and it is getting more wrong every year. Small businesses in Santa Fe, Rio Rancho, and Las Cruces keep asking me the same version of the question, so this post is my answer: a smaller website, done deliberately, will almost always outperform the sprawling one you were told to build.
How many pages does a small business website actually need?
For most small businesses, the honest answer is between eight and twenty pages. A local service business — a plumber, a law firm, a therapist — usually lands around eight to fifteen. A small retail shop or studio might reach twenty. A solo consultant or freelancer often ships with six to ten and does fine. The industry-average number people cite (sixteen to sixty-five) is skewed by mid-market companies with sprawling product lines and press archives; it is not a target for a small business.
The real number is not a target at all. It is an outcome of a simpler question: what does a visitor need to know, and where should each of those things live? When you answer that first, the page count sorts itself.
Why more pages hurts the site you already have
Every page you add competes with the pages already on your site. That is not a metaphor — it is how search engines and human attention both work.
On the search side, ranking authority is finite. When you have one strong page about “custom cabinetry in Albuquerque,” it can accumulate links, trust, and topical weight over years. When you split that into four pages — one on kitchen cabinets, one on built-ins, one on media consoles, one on office cabinetry — each one starts from zero and none of them ever reaches the strength the original could have had. This is why SEO writers now talk about “topical authority” and pillar pages instead of chasing a keyword per page. Depth beats breadth.
On the human side, choice is a tax. Columbia University’s research on decision-making found that when people are given fewer options, they are more likely to choose and more satisfied with what they chose. Cognitive-load research is even blunter: after about seven items, most readers stop reading and start scanning. Your top navigation should sit at four to seven links for exactly this reason, and if it does, most of the pages behind it should be a click or two deeper — not seventeen.
And on the maintenance side, every page you add is a page that can go stale. A thin, out-of-date page hurts your credibility more than a missing page does.
What earns a page? A three-question test
Before adding a page to a sitemap, I ask the client three questions. If the answer to any of them is no, the content usually belongs inside an existing page — or nowhere.
- Does someone actually search for this? Not “would it be nice to have.” Is there real intent behind the topic, either as an SEO query, a sales question you get in email, or a piece of context you keep repeating in phone calls?
- Would this page still be true a year from now? If the content is a promotion, a class schedule, or a seasonal offer, it should live on a page that already exists (services, news, home) — not on its own page that will need retiring.
- Is there enough to say that the page will feel substantial? A page with three paragraphs and no images looks abandoned. If a topic can’t hold five hundred words of useful writing, it is a section of a bigger page, not a page of its own.
This test is how the furniture maker went from 42 pages to 11. Species belonged in a single “materials” page with photos of each wood. Sanding, finishing, and delivery collapsed into one honest “how we build” page. What remained was substantial, evergreen, and easy to keep current.
Restraint is a design choice, not a limitation
Some of the sharpest websites I’ve worked on are also the smallest. In collaboration with Monsoon Design, I built the site for Santa Fe artist Jay Pearson around a deliberately quiet structure — a custom post type for an open-ended archive of works, a short about page, a contact page, and almost nothing else. The design defers to the art. Every decision to leave something out made room for what remained to breathe.
You do not have to be an artist for this to apply. A law firm with three attorneys does not need seven overlapping practice pages; it needs one crisp practice-areas page that reads like it was written by a human who tries cases. A restaurant does not need separate pages for its lunch, dinner, brunch, catering, and private-dining menus; it needs a menus page with all of them and a reservation link. Restraint is what makes a site feel expensive.
When more pages actually are the right answer
There are honest exceptions to all of this. A site that publishes real content — a blog with a genuine editorial schedule, a chapter of a nonprofit publishing event calendars, a manufacturer with a real product catalog — needs pages proportional to what it actually produces. A retailer with two hundred SKUs needs two hundred product pages. A statewide organization with fourteen chapters needs fourteen chapter pages. These are not decorative pages; they are the content.
The distinction is whether a page is a container for something real (a product, an event, a member profile, a project) or a container for the idea that you should have more pages. The first is worth building. The second is what turns a website into a burden.
What to do if your site already sprawled
If you are reading this from inside a site that already has forty pages you cannot keep current, do not panic and do not delete anything on your lunch break. The right move is a two-column audit: on one side, list every page; on the other, note the last real update, the traffic (from your analytics tool), and whether the content is still true. Pages with no traffic and no truth are candidates for consolidation into a stronger parent page — with proper redirects so you do not lose the small authority they built. Pages with a little traffic and out-of-date content need an editor, not a shovel. Do this once a year and the site will feel smaller without you actually removing much.
A quieter site is a more confident site
The instinct to keep adding pages usually comes from the same anxious place as the instinct to fill silence in a conversation. It is not persuasive; it is nervous. A site that says less, and says it better, reads as if the business behind it knows what it is doing.
If you are staring at a sitemap that keeps growing and wondering whether all of it belongs, the answer is almost always no. Patrick Iverson works with small businesses across New Mexico on web design and custom WordPress builds that start with what to leave out, not what to add. A conversation about your sitemap is a good place to begin.