Almost every web package is priced by page count, which is a strange way to buy something whose value has nothing to do with how many pages it has. A four-page site that answers the right questions will out-earn a twelve-page site that buries them. But page count is the unit the industry sells in, so it is worth knowing what you are actually getting.
The four pages that do the work
Home. Not a welcome mat. It has to answer three questions in the first screen: what you do, who it is for, and what to do next. Most home pages answer the first and forget the other two.
A generic page template. This is the one people undervalue. It is the template that every future page is built from: about, team, a specific service, a landing page for a campaign. Get this right and you can add pages for years without paying a developer again.
Blog index and post template. Two templates, usually counted as one page. You do not need them on day one if you are not going to write. You absolutely need them the moment you decide search matters, and retrofitting them later costs more than including them now.
Contact. A form, a phone number, and a genuine answer to what happens after someone submits it. The pages that convert say when you will reply.
The honest signals that four is not enough
Adding pages for the sake of it dilutes a site. These are the situations where it genuinely does not.
- You sell more than one thing to more than one buyer. A single services page describing five offerings converts worse than five pages that each speak to one problem. It also gives search engines something specific to rank.
- Someone has to trust you before they buy. Professional services, anything regulated, anything expensive. Team and about pages are not vanity here, they are part of the sale.
- You answer the same questions on every call. That is an FAQ page, and it will quietly shorten your sales cycle.
- You are hiring. A careers page pays for itself the first time it saves you a recruiter fee.
What page count never includes
Two things get quietly assumed and then argued about later. The first is content: copy, images and product data. Most fixed-price builds assume you provide it, and the timeline slips when you do not. The second is ecommerce. A store is not a page count problem. Product templates, cart, checkout and payment are a different kind of build.
If you take one thing from this: ask what the generic page template can do, and whether you can build new pages yourself once the site is handed over. That answer matters more than whether you bought four pages or ten.
