A popular trend in websites lately is a single-page design. An example would be this theme from StudioPress; it has a few sub-pages, but is largely a single, long home page.
Single-page sites make some sense. Users are used to scrolling and having a long page won’t hurt that. In addition, it allows users to read various sections without having to click and wait for additional pages to load.
The problem is how Google treats content on the internet. While there are ways to optimize single-page sites for better SEO, as a general rule you can only optimize a particular page for one or two key phrases. If you have a single page site, that really limits your options when compared to the various phrases you can use across a 10 page site.
Going from single-page to multi-page
A great example is a well-optimized single-page site that we recently rebuilt as a full “normal” website with approximately 50 pages. The results were immediate and awesome. In the previous three years, the site saw an average of 200-500 visitors per month from Google. The first month after the launch of the new site brought 2,464 Google searchers, and the next month saw 3,528 — and it continues to go up! The site was already well-linked and popular, but the single-page aspect was killing it. Here is a week-by-week chart from the past five months; the red arrow was when the new site launched.
There is a chance that a single-page site is indeed the best decision for your business, but be sure to dig into every aspect of it before you hop on the trend for the sake of “staying current”.
