The Pros And Cons Of Single-Page Websites
April 02, 2014 filed under: Digital Marketing, Website Design
You may have seen some of the slick new single-page websites out there. Maybe you’ve been wowed by their fancy graphics or found them easier to navigate on a smart phone (no longer do you have to keep track of that elusive site menu). So, are single-page websites the way to go?
By way of answering, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of single-page websites. But first, for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, let’s look at what a single-page website is.
Most obviously, single-page websites have only one page, so when you navigate to the website, the page that you land on is the page you’ll stay on as you explore its content. There’s no menu bar, instead, you scroll down to see the website.
One-page websites often include fancy graphics, like this page highlighting the recent redesign of the New York Times’ website. Or the Dangers of Fracking website, which uses scrolling and graphics to create an animation effect.
While design and graphics like these could be a chore to add to a multi-page website, it’s generally much less work to add the effects to a single-page website. Overall, single-page websites usually take less time to create.
There are downsides of course. With all of the flashy content, single-page websites can take a long time to load, which can be frustrating and could cause potential customers to leave your website before they learn what you’re about.
And then there’s the issue of fitting all of your website’s content onto one page – if you have more than just a little bit of content, this might be a big challenge. Plus, fitting new website content into your existing one-page structure could cause a creative headache down the road. If you like the features of single-page websites, but need more space for content than one page allows, you might consider modeling your website's landing page after a single-page website. That way you get the special features, but don't have to compromise on space.
Single-page website aren't great for SEO either. For example, it’s much harder to optimize a single page for multiple keywords or topics than it is to target specific keywords on specific webpages. Parts of a single-page website might match certain keywords, but it’s hard for all of the page to match all of your keywords.
So, although single-page sites have a lot of appealing features, in most cases, it’s unlikely that they would meet your website goals in the long term.