When it comes to digital presence, choosing the right solution is key for venture success, be it small business, huge enterprise, artist portfolio, or whatever springs to your mind. Despite the tremendous impact that social media has on the modern digital landscape, traditional websites still keep the brand.
In this article, we’ll look at two common types of websites – single-page vs multi-page website, common use cases, and their advantages. None of these come as a silver bullet to your venture’s success. Thus, picking the right option depends on many factors. But before we tinker with technical details, let’s find out what these websites are and when they come in handy.
Understanding Single-page Websites
A single-page website is a type of website that represents a set of minimalistic functionality and design. All content within such a website sits on the same page, usually in a long-scrolling layout. The most common purpose of such websites is to provide users with a simple interface and a narrow context on a specific thing.
Popular Single-page Website Use Cases
For example, a single-page website can be a good foundation for businesses to present some goods’ (or services’) details and values to their target buyers. With the right information about their product of choice, visitors can place their order right on that page using a call-to-action (CTA) button usually implemented within. These are landing page websites.
Many artists benefit from single-page websites as their digital portfolios. This way, they can publish their works and presentations on the web using simple and intuitive administration tools the single-page websites offer. Likewise, art enthusiasts can scroll down the minimalistic portfolio site and check the latest publications without distractions to the excessive information usually present on traditional multi-page websites.
The minimalistic design and ease of launch make single-page websites popular among users. Along with marketing landing pages and portfolios, single-page sites often serve as digital business cards, online résumés, app promotions, etc.
Exploring Multi-page Websites
Multi-page websites have a more comprehensive design and navigation and offer much more flexibility in terms of content versatility. That means companies choosing multi-page websites have more options to build authority and confidence by covering topics relevant to their industry and potential customer needs.
Because multi-page websites suit any type of business and purpose, they have become the most popular on the Internet so far. However, the best uses for multi-page websites include digital retail stores, large enterprise websites, professional marketing agency websites, all-encompassing web blogs, and other implementations.
Best Uses for Multi-page Websites
When deciding upon single-page vs multi-page website for e-commerce, most retailers prefer multi-page websites as their platform of choice. This seems logical, as multi-page websites provide best practices in website architecture, including well-structured organization of product information, dedicated checkout pages, feedback forms, and more. In addition, multi-page websites offer robust navigation and functionality that facilitates better inventory management and search.
Furthermore, digital marketing agencies choose multi-page websites because of their enhanced layout and design capabilities. This allows them to promote their best case studies, which reflect high-end design implementations, without losing quality.
Reliability, flexibility, and top-tier design capabilities make the multi-page website an excellent choice for businesses looking to deliver the most of their presentation aptitudes and expertise.
However, despite their advantages, building and maintaining a high-quality multi-page website requires more time and effort. This includes significant development costs, varying from a couple of thousands to even millions of dollars, as well as maintenance and administration, which require high-end technical skills at extra cost.
Which is Better for SEO: Single-page or Multi-page Website?
When running a successful digital venture, one of the crucial points is deciding how you plan to attract visitors to your website. Therefore, your top priority should be an effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. In other words, your website must contain elements that work together to improve visibility and ranking on search engines. These include quality content and keywords, on-page components, backlinks and interlinking, and other essential SEO practices.
Is a Single-page Website Good for SEO?
While single-page websites offer the best website structure for small businesses, they often come with some trade-offs. In terms of quality content, single-page websites usually have so-called thin content, with a narrow focus on a specific subject, which may not be enough for search engines like Google to index and rank such pages properly.
Nonetheless, due to their narrow context, one-page websites can limit your organic traffic growth potential by targeting a small group of keywords. The thin content issue may also limit the ability to optimize on-page effectively. Insufficient metadata, tags, headers, and other crucial SEO elements leave search engine bots without the necessary data to index such pages properly and rank them highly. The same applies to backlink incorporation and interlinking ‒ you simply lack the room to use them efficiently.
Does it actually mean that single-page websites are doomed? No! Of course not. Adopting a single-page approach is more likely to require more paid funnel traffic vs a traditional website. Single-page websites still rank well in search engines. You just need to follow SEO best practices for single-page websites. Stick to a clear structure, laconic content, relevant links, and optimized images to get the most out of it.
Improving Website SEO with Multi-page Structures
Multi-page websites provide more options for comprehensive SEO practices through flexibility and content versatility, offering a better chance to meet potential visitor queries through relevant keywords. This is an advantage of multi-page design, which may bring more organic traffic to your website. As organic audience naturally digs deeper into the website’s content to find answers to their questions, more content better serves their goal, increasing website authority and user loyalty.
Furthermore, choosing a multi-page website lets you line up content that naturally attracts links. This includes plenty of room to incorporate consistent interlinking and relevant topics to connect with external reputable sources, which also fits into healthy SEO practices. Meanwhile, the variety of metadata, tags, and well-organized heading structure ensures search engine crawlers get enough material to index such websites properly and rank them among the top search results.
Lastly, multi-page sites provide better opportunities for content optimization using blogs, FAQs, and dedicated product pages. Well-structured and optimized page content enables the presentation of website information in search results as user-friendly text snippets that attract more visitors to your website.
Otherwise, intricate content structures can overwhelm search engines. Hence, when considering the pros and cons of a multi-page structure, you must properly define your content strategy and plan before choosing this option.
User Experience in Single-page Websites vs Multi-page Websites
Regardless of which website type you choose, it should have clear navigation and a user-friendly interface to ensure the best possible customer journey.
User Journey in Single-page vs Multi-page Website
Many users like single-page websites because of their plain and intuitive navigation, which results in a seamless experience. Visitors do not have to switch between countless pages but can instead focus on their goals.
While narrow context is less distracting for users, single-page websites often lack clear structure and hierarchy. Too much content on a single page can leave users confused and frustrated. Therefore, thorough planning and moderation of the content are required to achieve an excellent user experience on single-page websites.
Want to learn more about the design implications of single-page vs. multi-page sites? Check out our comprehensive design-focused comparison here.
Website Navigation in Multi-page Designs
How does a multi-page website improve user experience? Unlike single-page websites, multi-page websites provide a complete set of navigation elements necessary to attract and retain users. They help overcome single-page design limitations by introducing functional navigation elements that convey the user journey well.
These elements include a Home page containing general information, a header navigation menu to quickly move through website sections, breadcrumbs, and other fancy controllers that allow users to quickly find the information they need or perform actions they want.
In summary, it is common for different users to come to your website with their unique goals and needs in mind. Thus, properly mapping their journey through a well-organized structure and navigation elements helps align website content with their intent.
Get in touch with our experts to get more multi-page navigation tips for better SEO.
Performance and Speed: Single-page vs Multi-page Websites
Website performance is another important quality that impacts SEO ranking and user experience. In today’s highly competitive market, offering your customers a website that loads fast and performs well on desktop and mobile platforms is more of a convention than a good thing to have. Page speed is one of the factors that directly affects its ranking and creates the first impression for users. Clunky websites that take minutes to load are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
Loading Speed Considerations for Single-page Websites
Single-page websites are designed to be fast. When set up correctly, they use dynamic fetching without loading all of the website’s content at once. Instead, the content loads as the user scrolls down the page. The lazy load, supported by anchor links, allows users to move faster across the webpage, ensuring rapid response to user interaction and improving the conversion rate. In addition, one-page sites have proven to be excellent mobile sites.
Performance Optimization for Multi-page Websites
On the other hand, a multi-page website may require more effort to ensure smooth performance. Therefore, tuning techniques appear to be more sophisticated and require technical skills to set up. These include implementing Content Delivery Networks (CDN), caching, compression, and other approaches. Thus, the site’s maintenance becomes more complex as well.
Conversion Rate and User Engagement
Website conversions mean successful actions. A well-organized structure, smooth performance, and a user-friendly interface are the basis for increasing conversion rates and user engagement for single-page and multi-page websites. However, as mentioned earlier, single-page websites are often used as landing pages ‒ specifically designed for high conversions. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that landing pages usually accompany multi-page websites with an exact goal ‒ to get users to the main site.
Other common objectives for the landing page conversion may be downloading content, signing up for a newsletter, subscribing to a service, or even making an ecom transaction.
Choosing the Right Website for Your Needs
When choosing the type of website for your business, the first step is to define the goals you want to achieve with your efforts. Both single-page and multi-page websites offer an excellent foundation for becoming present and even popular on the web. Therefore, your choice should follow your realistic needs and capabilities.
When to Use a Single-page Website
Many companies use single-page websites as landing pages to attract new leads. They are also popular among startups and new brands, becoming an excellent fit for prototype advertising and communicating brand values.
Looking at single-page website pros and cons for startups, keep in mind that starting a website as a single page doesn’t limit you to that implementation. On the contrary, it can become the basis for further growth into a full-scale multi-page site.
Check out our blog for a complete guide on creating a simple website for a small venture.
Why Choose a Multi-page Website?
Multi-page websites rely on complex architecture and layouts. They offer great opportunities for organic growth by implementing versatile content and sophisticated design. However, when considering the pros and cons of a multi-page structure, ensure you have enough capacity and skills to maintain such an intricate structure, as it is more difficult to update and manage.
For your website and business to grow and develop, we strongly recommend finding a reliable and experienced partner to support you on your digital journey. If you want to build a comprehensive interactive website, find more helpful information on our dedicated blog.
