About five core pages, plus one for each service a customer would search for by name, plus one for each town you can say something true about. For most local service businesses that is 10 to 30 pages. In our count of 99 real local business sites, the median was 37 and one in seven had ten or fewer.
Every article on this question gives a number, and they do not agree: five to eight, five to ten, eight to twelve, ten to twenty. None of them says where the number came from. The real difficulty is that the right count depends on what you sell and where, so a single number is always going to be wrong for somebody.
What we can give you is a way to work out your own number, and a real count to compare it with. We read the sitemaps of 99 US local business websites, plumbers to dentists, and counted their pages.
How many pages do real local business websites have?
The sitemap is the list of pages a site gives to search engines, which makes it a fair count of what the business has published. We excluded images, blog posts and archive pages, so the figures below are the site’s actual pages.
| Pages, excluding posts and media | Sites |
|---|---|
| 1 to 5 | 4 |
| 6 to 10 | 6 |
| 11 to 20 | 11 |
| 21 to 50 | 32 |
| 51 to 100 | 22 |
| More than 100 | 20 |
Our own count of public XML sitemaps. Sample of 122 local businesses across eight trades and eighteen US metros, of which 99 publish a sitemap. The largest counts include pages such as form thank-you pages, so the median is a better guide than the top of the range. No business is named.
The median was 37 pages, and the middle half of sites had between 20 and 85. Only one in seven had ten or fewer. Whatever the guides say, real local businesses that compete online publish a lot more than five pages.
| Trade | Median pages |
|---|---|
| HVAC | 24 |
| Plumber | 28 |
| Accountant | 30 |
| Electrician | 32 |
| Landscaper | 36 |
| Dentist | 38 |
| Roofer | 58 |
| Pest control | 67 |
10 to 14 sites per trade, so treat these as directional. Medians rounded to whole pages.
The spread between trades makes sense once you look at what the pages are. Pest control sites tend to have a page per pest. Roofers often have a page per roof type and a page per town. An accountant with three core services needs fewer. The number follows the services and the places, not the size of the business.
The formula: how to work out your own number
| Page type | How many | What goes on it |
|---|---|---|
| Home | 1 | What you do, where, and how to get in touch, in the first screen |
| About | 1 | Who you are, how long you have traded, licences and the people |
| Contact | 1 | Phone, form, hours and service area, as plain text |
| Reviews or work examples | 1 | Proof, ideally with real jobs and photos |
| Privacy policy | 1 | Required once you collect names and emails, see below |
| Service pages | One per service that passes the test below | The job, the price or range, the process, the questions people ask |
| Location pages | One per town you can say something specific about | Jobs done there, travel time, local rules. Not a copy with the name swapped |
| Posts | Optional | Answers to real customer questions. Not part of the core count |
So a plumber with six services and three towns they genuinely serve lands at around fourteen pages. A dentist with eight distinct treatments and one location, around thirteen. Both are well inside the range real sites have, and both have a page for each thing a customer might search for. Fuller page plans for two trades are in plumber website design and HVAC website design.
Does every service need its own page?
Most guides say “main services yes, minor variations no” and leave you to decide which is which. Three questions settle it.
- Would a customer search for it by name? “Water heater replacement” yes. “Pipe” no.
- Does it have its own price, process or timescale? If you would explain it differently on the phone, it is a different service.
- Do customers ask questions about it specifically? If there are three or four questions only this service raises, those answers need a home.
Two yeses and it gets a page. Fewer, and it is a section on the page for the service it belongs to.
| Business | Own page | A section on another page |
|---|---|---|
| Plumber | Drain cleaning, water heaters, sewer line repair, leak detection, repiping, emergency call-outs | Faucet repair, garbage disposals, toilet repair, under general repairs |
| Dentist | Implants, Invisalign or clear aligners, crowns, whitening, emergency dentistry, children’s dentistry | Fillings, cleanings and X-rays, under general dentistry |
| Accountant | Business tax returns, bookkeeping, payroll, individual tax returns | Quarterly estimates, amended returns, under the relevant tax page |
The page-per-service rule has a reason beyond search rankings now. When someone asks an AI assistant for “a dentist near me who does implants”, the assistant needs a page that says you do implants, in plain text, to point to. A list of twelve services in a single paragraph on the homepage is much harder to cite than a page that is about one of them.
The best service pages I see are not long. They say what the job is, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, and answer the four questions people actually ring up to ask.
What about a page for every town?
This is the real question for a trade business, and it has a clear answer in Google’s own rules. Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse, and one of the examples is “pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page”.
From Google Search Central, spam policies, doorway abuse and scaled content abuse.
The line is whether each page is genuinely useful on its own. A town page that lists jobs you did there, how quickly you can get there, the local permit rules and a review from someone on that street is a real page. Thirty copies of the same text with the town name changed is the thing Google describes.
The sites in our sample show both. 43 of the 99 have location-style pages, which is reasonable for businesses that travel to customers. Twelve have twenty or more, and one HVAC firm’s sitemap lists more than 500 pages pairing a service with a town name. Whether those pages are useful depends on what is on them, but that many is hard to fill with something true about every place.
If you could not write three sentences about a town that would be untrue of the next town over, it does not need its own page yet. List it on your service area page instead.
Is a one page website enough?
For a brand new business testing demand, or a business that works entirely from referrals, a single good page can do the job. For an established local business that wants to be found by people who have not heard of it, usually not. A one page site has one title and one description to match every search, so it can rank for your name and not much else. It also gives an AI assistant nothing specific to point to when someone asks for a particular service.
Does every site need a privacy policy?
If you are in the US and your site has a contact form, almost certainly. California’s Online Privacy Protection Act requires any commercial website that collects personally identifiable information from California residents to “conspicuously post its privacy policy”. Names and email addresses through a contact form count, and you cannot control which states your visitors live in.
California Business and Professions Code, section 22575. Not legal advice.
Do more pages mean more leads?
You will see a figure, from a well-known marketing software company’s study of its own customers around 2011, that businesses with more than 40 landing pages got twelve times the leads of those with five or fewer. It is widely quoted and it does not mean what it is used to mean. Bigger businesses have more pages and more leads for the same reason: they are bigger. The study shows the two go together, not that adding pages causes leads.
What does hold up is simpler. A page that answers one specific question, for one specific customer, gives that customer a reason to find you. A page that exists only to make the count bigger gives nobody anything. If your site already has plenty of pages and enquiries are still thin, the problem is probably elsewhere, and the order to check things in is in why your website is not getting leads.
The page count also drives the price. Every page needs writing, photos and a reason to exist, which is why a quote for a twelve page site and a quote for a forty page site are not the same job. If you are comparing quotes, count the pages each one includes first.
What a site of each size typically costs is set out in what a website redesign costs, and the list of what to gather before the build starts is in what to send your web designer.
Common questions
How many pages should a small business website have?
About five core pages, plus one per service customers search for by name, plus one per town you can say something specific about. For most local service businesses that is 10 to 30. Across 99 real local business sites we counted, the median was 37 pages.
What pages does a small business website need?
Home, about, contact, reviews or examples of work, and a privacy policy, plus a page for each main service. Add location pages only where you have something true and specific to say about each place.
Should each service have its own page?
Yes, if customers would search for it by name, it has its own price or process, or it raises its own questions. Two of the three and it deserves a page. Otherwise make it a section on a related service page.
Is a one page website good for a small business?
For a new business or a referral-only one, it can be. For an established business that wants to be found by new customers, usually not: one page can only match a narrow range of searches and gives AI assistants nothing specific to cite.
Are location pages bad for SEO?
Not if each one is genuinely useful: real jobs, travel times or local rules for that town. Google’s spam policies call pages made for cities that funnel visitors to one page doorway abuse, so near-identical copies with only the town name changed are the risk.
Can search engines and AI read the pages you have?
Our free checker reads your homepage the way search engines and AI assistants do, and shows what they can see. About ten seconds, no email required.