The short answer
There is no right number. A small business site needs one page for each service people search for separately, one for each area it genuinely serves, plus the pages that build trust and take inquiries. Count the jobs, then the pages follow.
Start from jobs, not a page count
A page earns its place when it does a job nobody else on the site is doing. For a service business, the jobs are fairly predictable: explain each service well enough that someone can decide, show who is behind the work, prove it has been done before and make it easy to get in touch.
A website with five pages that each do a clear job will usually serve a business better than one with forty pages that repeat each other. Extra pages are only useful when they answer something new.
The pages almost every service business needs
- A home page that says what the business does, for whom and where, within the first screen.
- One page for each main service that people search for by name. A plumber who fits boilers and unblocks drains has two services, because those are two different searches by two different people.
- An about page with the real people, the history and anything that shows the business is established.
- A contact page with the form, the phone number, the hours and the area covered.
- Proof: reviews, examples of work or short case notes, either on their own page or woven into the service pages.
For many small businesses, that is the whole site. The number of pages comes from the services, not the other way round, and a short site that is complete beats a long one padded to look substantial.
When more pages make sense
A site grows for two good reasons. The first is a service that splits into separate searches. If people look for "end of tenancy cleaning" and "office cleaning" separately, and the answers are different, each deserves its own page.
The second is location. A business that serves several towns may need a page for each, but only when it can say something specific about each one: the area covered, the work done there, the details that differ. A set of location pages that only swap the town name is a weakness, not an asset. Our guide to why another site ranks above yours covers how that kind of thin structure holds a site back.
Articles and answers come later. They help when they respond to real questions customers ask, and they do the most good when each one points to the service page it supports.
A quick way to check your own site
List every page on the site. Next to each, write the one question it answers. Then look for three things:
- Two pages answering the same question. Merge them or give each a clearer role.
- A question customers ask often that no page answers. That is a page to write.
- A page that answers nothing anyone asks. Improve it, merge it or retire it.
This takes an hour and tells you more than any page count. If you want a second pair of eyes on the structure, our site architecture work starts with exactly this list.