One Page Websites Not Always The Best

One of the latest design trends that continues to gain popularity is a single page website. These are sites that essentially have one long scrolling homepage. Often times a navigation menu is still in place simply to drop you down the page to the corresponding content.

Why is it so popular?

This trend continues to become more popular with small businesses for a few reasons. For starters, it creates a very visually appealing homepage. It is no secret that your homepage is the single most important page. It is more than likely that this page gets the most traffic of your site and is therefore the first impression that users get. Further, it is the dashboard into diving deeper into the site or taking on a call to action. Lastly, you can really ‘wow’ your audience with these single page sites with the use of design effects like parallax, animations, full width sliders, etc many of which are available within WordPress themes like Divi.

Why we love Divi as a WordPress theme framework. 

Factors to be aware of

There are several factors to take into consideration for whether this design style is right for you.

1. Search Engine Value – if a search engine presence is important to you than you should be aware of the fact that having a one page website is going to be difficult to rank organically for your targeted keywords. A website that has only one page is only giving Google one page to index when they crawl your website. This means only one page title and meta description among other SEO tactics. Having a multi-page website gives google more URLs to crawl and helps them understand how you have broken out the content of your site and how it is prioritized.
2. Information Overload – Have you ever been to Las Vegas and you get lost in all the flashing lights, street vendors, and casinos? Often times one-page websites try to cram too much information on one page and the user does not understand the clear call to action that you are presenting. If you have a lot of content, breaking it out into multiple pages is usually a better solution.
3. Publishing New Content Regularly (like blogging) – If you are going to be consistently adding new content to your site like through a Blog, a multi-page website is a better fit. If you are continuing to add content to a single page then your page is going to get longer and longer over time. At a certain point, even a single scrolling page is too long for a user to find what they are looking for. You can still stream the latest posts and excerpts onto your homepage, but giving users the ability to click to the individual page to read the article will present a better user experience.
4. Online Marketing Efforts – If you are running various marketing campaigns for products or services you offer it is very common to use landing pages specific to the content you are promoting or send users directly to a product or service page rather than the homepage.

Which is best for me?

In conclusion, the design trend of single page websites may still be a good fit for your event or group, but for organizations that have more content, value search engine rankings and continue to publish new content you should not necessarily lean towards the single page style.