When we audit a stalled site, the first thing we count is pages. The second thing we count is the number of pages a real customer has visited in the last thirty days. The two numbers are almost never close.
A small business — a restaurant, a clinic, a consultancy, a hotel — usually needs five pages: a home page, an about page, a services or menu page, a journal or news page, and a contact page. That is it. The other twenty-three pages are aspirations from a 2018 redesign that no one has had the heart to delete.
There is nothing wrong with growing into more pages. Anthology projects, our largest tier, often run to twenty templates. The point is not that small is intrinsically better. The point is that fewer pages, written better, will outperform more pages written worse — every time.
When we propose a five-page Volume project to a client, we are not selling them less. We are selling them less surface area to maintain, fewer pages to write, fewer dead links to apologise for. A site that is small and current beats a site that is large and abandoned. We have measured this on six audits in the last year.
If you are about to commission a redesign, count the pages your visitors actually use. The list is shorter than you think.