As website designed has modernised, we’ve seen an influx of new design trends design to be sleek, responsive and efficient for the user to navigate. Alongside this has been an interest in minimising design time input, leading to lower overall costs for a web design. With style designs such as single page scrollers, this is has been one of the benefits of adoption, but there are also negatives. I’ll go through the breakdowns here to help you better understand the benefits and drawbacks of multiple page and single page scroller websites for your business.
Multiple Page Websites
The most common type of design format that users would be familiar with – a multiple-page website is just that, multiple pages. With common pages such as Home, About, Services, Blog, Contact – your website will cover in individual pages the related topic. The primary Pros and Cons for multiple page websites are:
Pros
- Most versatile design – with individual pages you’re not limited by the amount of content you can put on your website, whilst also allowing a broad number of topics, sections and products to be covered
- Comprehensive – if you have a business with multiple services, these can all be individually outlined, allowing you to have your breadth of services to be visible to users on your website. This also helps Google to understand your business better when determining what searches to make you visible on, which can increase the amount of traffic to your business and potential searches.
Cons
- Being more comprehensive, this can require more time to build individual pages and generate content, which can lead to slightly higher design costs
- If you have a simple business with limited services/products/information – a multiple page website can be more than required. For example, if you’re wanting to run a simple blog on an activity or sport you play, or run an online business which sells one particular product, you can consider whether you need the extra pages
What Types of Businesses suit Multiple Page Websites – most businesses suit this type of website. If you have a multiple services, products or anything more than a minimal amount of information to provide potential users, a multiple page website is essential.
Single Page Scrollers
Whilst existing for several years, with the increase in the number of self-built websites and ready-made themes available, there has been an explosion in the usage of single page scroller style websites. Confined to a single page with all information, these websites can still feature menus, contact forms and all the usual elements you would expect of a website, but on a single long scrolling style web page. The primary Pros and Cons for single page scroller websites are:
Pros
- Simplicity – being only a single page, there isn’t any worry about having to structure links, sitemaps, writing large amounts of content over a dozen pages etc.
- Mobile device Friendly – whilst any good website designed now will be fully functional on websites, single page scrollers provide that extra seamless transitions between sections without having to load additional pages or click on links/buttons
- Price – in some cases this style of website design can be slightly cheaper as it require less time to generate (however it is a more basic product)
Cons
- Too simple – if you’re running any business or website which has more than a narrow singular focus, a single page scroller can be limiting in being able to adequately highlight your products or services. Single page scroller websites excel for those looking to sell a single item online to those who use mobile devices, but fall short for service businesses (tradesmen and professionals) and multiple product businesses (both brick and mortar physical businesses and online multiple products stores)
- Limited Content Space – being a single page can help those with limited content (whether it be images or text) to share, but what about those who have a lot to say about their business or products? Single page scroller websites user experience is dependent on having a relatively finite scroll length, so you need to avoid building too long a website because of extensive content, otherwise you can make it very difficult for users to scroll to the end to find order areas, contact forms etc.
- SEO targeting issues – Google’s algorithms which determine which websites to rank try to identify the specific theme of a web page in the process of choosing what to come up when a potential customer searches for your product or service. With single page scroller websites because all content is on the single long page, this can result in the algorithms being ‘confused’ as to how to categorise the page, or in the case of multiple services or products offered, only determine you provide only a fraction of what you actually do.
What Types of Businesses suit Single Page Scroller Websites – single service/product online purchase businesses for mobile devices. Impulse or small widget style purchases work well with this type of website style.
Other Things to Consider
- Page loading times (especially mobile devices) – with any device when it loads a website, it will load only the active page opened. This means that in the case of a single page scroller website, it will have to load the entire content of the website, whilst on a multiple page website you will only load the specific page being visited. This can lead to potentially faster loading speeds for multiple page websites, especially if properly optimised.
- User Experience – counter to the above, the general consensus within the website design community favours single page scroller websites for businesses which will primarily receive mobile device traffic, as the single scroller website once loaded provides seamless transitioning between pages
Overall when considering what type of website design style to choose, it will larger be focused on your type of business and breadth of services or products on offer. Incorrectly choosing the wrong type of website for your needs can provide subpar results. This can be extremely detrimental to a business if incorrectly setup. A recent example of this can be found on the www.greenbuildsa.com.au website, which we converted from a single page scroller website to a multiple page website. With this single change, we were able to have Google’s algorithms to properly identify the various services provided (residential solar, commercial, battery storage and off-grid solutions) increasing the services and products ranking on Google by 800%.
Would you like help to better understand the right type of website design style for your business? ClickBurst are experts in Website Design and can help find the right solutions for you. Contact us today for a discussion on the options available to you.
