There are countless designs to consider when you are building a website. Most have positive and negative points, but there is one design that we have stopped recommending: The one-page website. Here’s why.
A One-Page Website Won’t Allow You To Incorporate a Blog
A blog can increase traffic to your site and boost its SEO. It is the perfect way to add fresh content to your site. This is sharable content that can be key to strong organic rankings. Because you can blog about things related to your business, your blog is an effective way to use new, related keywords, giving you a chance to rank for niche searches.
Speaking of Keywords – A One-Page Site Will Fall Short
If you have several keywords you want to incorporate, you will want a multiple-page website. This way, you have more pages on which you can focus on specific keywords for each page. On the other hand, a one-page site will reduce the number of keywords for which you can try to rank, making it harder for Google to notice you.
A One-Page Site Has Limited Meta-Data
A multi-page website has unique meta-data for each page, increasing the specialized content that users can access. On the other hand, a single-page website has only one set of meta-data, giving you only one title tag and description. This gives you only one chance to grab their attention and limits the specialized content the site can display.
It Takes Longer for One-Page Sites to Load
Loading speed is a major ranking factor in the world of SEO. Sites that take a long time to load will be ranked lower by Google. Burdening a single page with flash videos, images, text content, parallax effects, and other features can cause the site to become bogged down. It will take longer to load than a website with information spread across multiple pages. Slow load times are a huge turnoff to visitors and web users. They don’t have the patience to wait for the whole site to load on a single web page.
One-Page Sites Lack Internal Links
SEO algorithms favor sites with both internal and external links. However, a single-page website is limited in its ability to include many internal links. While you can use anchor links to jump to another page section, you can’t link to other pages because there are none. And you shouldn’t use external links on a single-page website because it quickly leads visitors away from your website.
A multi-page website can include many internal links leading visitors to the various pages on the site. These links increase the site’s SEO ranking.
One-Page Websites Can’t Share Lots of Information
A single-page website is not for you if you provide several different services or products. You will want to dedicate a page to each service or product to be able to use unique keywords and differentiate each of them. Learn more about why services need their own page on your website.
A Multi-Page Site Is More Shareable Than a One-Page Website
Because single-page websites have all their content on one page, it can be difficult to allow visitors to share specific elements of your content. Although social shares are not an SEO ranking factor, there is a strong correlation between a website’s rankings and how often its content is shared.
Analytics are Difficult With a One-Page Website
You can use Google Analytics to track goals that you set for your website. Analytics can give you valuable insights into how users navigate your site, which pages they bounce from, and which are the most popular.
With a one-page website, much of these insights aren’t available to you. If you’ve got a high bounce rate or low session duration, there is no way to know which element on your web page is causing the problem? You can use a tool like Hotjar to track metrics like scroll depth, but you’ll miss out on a lot of info about your site’s performance that GA4 can provide.
Get a Multi-Page Website
Multi-page websites are far more flexible and SEO friendly than single-page sites. They can contain more content, show the variety of services or products you offer, and play friendly with analytics to give you the information you need to better reach the audience you want. Iceberg Web Design can build you a professional multi-page website that reaches the audience you need. Contact us today!