Single Page Site vs. Multi Page Site

By Hazel Burgess on 10.09.15   /   Website Design   /   Leave a comment

The purpose of this article is to focus on one of those questions: should you choose a single page site or a multi page site design, which is better for your business? A single page site design was previously used predominately for online portfolios, but over the past several years has grown in popularity, causing confusion for many business website owners. Once you’re done reading this article, you’ll have a better idea which option is right for your business website.

Will Your Type Of Business Benefit From A Single Page Site Design?

The essential decisive factor in choosing between a single page site or multi page site design is to first determine your online marketing goals for your business. For example, if the purpose of your website is to serve as an online brochure for your business, a single page site design would be a perfect choice. You could concisely include a summary about your business, customer reviews, brief sales info, contact details including a map and more. Otherwise, you may end up wasting countless hours trying to fill up pages on a multi page site.

Conversely, single page websites are not a good choice for large companies or if you have a lot to say. Large scale businesses need multi page websites in order to accommodate large quantity of data such product descriptions if you selling online, blog articles, pages for staff, and so on.

Creating The Best User Experience

Your website loading time is a very important factor to consider. People are busy touching and swiping on mobile devices and do not want to wait before they see the first glimpse of content that’s creeping onto their screens. Additionally, your website should be easy to navigate or it could be the difference between a sale or lost prospect. Google’s new algorithm is geared towards a positive user experience because they ultimately want to rank sites that people not only find informative, but also easy to navigate.

So, there’s no right answer here regarding the user’s experience for single page site or multi page site. A content focused single page site can have an intuitive flow, making the navigation process extremely easy. The crucial thing to remember is that if you see that you have more than a moderate amount of information to convey on a single page site, you should definitely consider changing to a multi page site to provide an optimal user experience and not cram too much content on one page.

What About Search Engine Optimization?

While SEO is an important element of a business website online marketing strategy, it can sometimes be made too complicated. But, Google does have an opinion of your site’s design choice.

A multi page site offers the benefit of targeting individual keywords on a per-page basis. That page could potentially get numerous rankings for specific long tail keywords. For example, you could have a page targeting San Diego website design company while another page targets small business website design. These are distinct phrases, both of which are related, but will contain different information. Google appreciates this.

Conversely, using a single page to target distinct keywords phrases can quickly get disorganized. Google is not likely to allocate a number of loosely contextually related keywords to your site’s single page even if it ranks well.

Remember, content on a single page design is mostly summarized due to the lack of available space. So, attempting to rank for keywords contained in that content probably won’t be long enough to offer much value to Google. While there are many factors to consider when choosing between a multi page site design or a single page site design, a multi page site provides your website multiple chances of being ranked for multiple keyword phrases. But, it’s not that clear-cut.

Our recommendation is don’t take the risk of sacrificing your business online success in order to adopt the latest trends and always focus on what you think is best for your visitors.