One page website vs. inside pages

Community
1

Hi there,

I am building a website for a friend who wants one page website built for ease of updating. However, there is a lot of content that would appear on the page.

I’m wondering if it’s better to have a one page or breaking the content into several pages?

I’m thinking that having multiple pages will benefit SEO and page load speed.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this.

Thanks!

2

I’ve no idea how it would affect SEO, but as a potential visitor, I would much rather see a site with several short pages, where I can easily navigate and find the content I want than a single long page requiring endless scrolling up and down.

Build it for your users, not for SEO or ease of updating.

4 Likes
3

I think that what you are asking about are usually called Single Page Applications. So you can search for website single page applications SEO and page load speed. I see many results, including the following.

1 Like
4

If you are using PHP then I would be tempted to adopt the following layout because:

  1. far easier to debug
  2. each page can be called separately
  3. global variables and defined constants can be utilised

file: index.php:

<?php 
declare(strict_types=1);

define('ONE_PAGE', TRUE);
$title = 'title goes here';

?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <?php require 'incs/hdg-000.php'; ?>
</head>
<body>
<?php 
  require '/incs/logo-000.php';

  require '/incs/page-001.php';
  require '/incs/page-002.php';
  require '/incs/page-003.php';
  require '/incs/page-004.php';

  require '/incs/footer.php';

file: page-001.php

<?php 
declare(strict_types=1);

defined('ONE_PAGE') ?: define('ONE_PAGE', FALSE);  

//==================================
  if( ONE_PAGE) : 
    // DO NOT PRINT HEADER
  else :
?>
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html lang="en">
    <head>
    <?php require 'incs/hdg-001.php'; ?>
    </head>
    <body>
    <?php require 'logo-001.php'; ?>
<?php endif; 
//==================================

 echo '<h1> page-001.php </h1>';
 echo '<div> Content goes here </div>';

  if(ONE_PAGE) : 
     // DO NOT PRINT FOOTER
  else:
    require 'footer-001.php';
  endif;
1 Like
7

Your site must be user friendly and I believe the site with multiple inner short pages with proper navigation will definitely benefit SEO and provide a good user experience.

8

Why? Do you have any sources that back that up?

9

Well i don’t know about SEO, but having subpages would certainly be beneficial to internal analytics as to what content is popular on your site, etc.

My general rule of thumb is that if you cant fit your text content on a 8x11 piece of paper (you remember those, right :stuck_out_tongue:) then you should have multiple pages, ideally split across subjects, or steps, or whatever natural splits are in your content.
There are of course exceptions to that rule, such as an indivisiblle body of content, but at that point considerations of audience should come into play. Most people will TLDR a site that makes them scroll and scroll to get to the information they want.