Single Page Websites

Your planning your new website, in all its glorious pages, sitemaps with user flow and content. You have that deadline in mind when you want to launch the site, for that event or business milestone but as the weeks go by, you haven’t progressed? Life, work, stuff to manage, just disrupts everything, you’re stuck in analysis paralysis. Fear not.

Another type of site has been growing in popularity with small businesses and startups and popping up in Edinburgh web design agencies portfolios. Behold, the single-page site, possibly the answer to your website woes.

What is a single-page site? 

• One page
• Easy to navigate
• Clean and simple
• Effective, streamlined content

Basically, single-page sites are sites that do what they say on the tin, they only have one page, keeping everything that needs saying in a single document.

No need to navigate to multiple pages, information such as who you are, what you do, where you are and how to get in touch is intuitively gathered together in one place.

Frequently, each page section is ordered in a specific flow and labelled for the user, with the menu smoothly scrolling you to each section rather than navigating to a new page. This lack of browser and page loading means your user can find the information they want much quicker.

Single page websites are often kept quite simple as to not overawe the user with too much information on their screen at the one time, but there’s no limit to the amount of rich media content you can add. Single-page sites often include videos, galleries, maps and forms to engage the audience, without overwhelming them with choices.

What are the advantages? 

Higher conversion rates

SIngle page websites are designed with an end goal in mind, guiding the user to the websites intended action, such as a contact form, product purchase or sign up. Reducing distraction and giving the user just enough to take the next step. That’s why single page sites are often used on landing pages, launch pages and events. The fact there’s typically only one main action to be taken by the user, has proven to increase conversions by more than 37%. That’s because site navigation doesn’t interfere with this focus.

Your website goes live faster

Your time to market is dramatically reduced, meaning less work for you and an efficient build. This works great if you have a sudden deadline to meet for an event launch or product launch. They also work great as a starting point for your company which can be fleshed out and expanded into a full website at a later phase or even to test user interest in your company before investing heavily.

Ideal for mobile devices

With responsive web design an industry standard, the difficulties of navigation websites on a small screen has been dramatically reduced dramatically, but it can still be a pain using such a small screen.  

However, single-page websites are much easier to optimise for mobile and even easier to navigate for the user. In essence, we are just asking them to replicate a task they probably perform way more than they would like to admit…just keep scrolling down as you do on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!

What are the downsides?

As you would expect, you aren’t going to be able to have a vast array of unique and useful information waiting to be devoured for your users. Single page websites limit the amount of content you can have when compared with multi-page websites.

It can also make search engine optimisation more of an uphill task, restricting the content you can have on the site which will, in turn, make ranking on search engines for multiple keywords and phrases tough and more expensive.

If those goals are for the future you and right now you need to get online, test a business idea or you need to quickly replace your current site, then single page websites are your friend. Don’t think of it as simply a single page vs a multiple page website choice, think of what stage of business you are in and what goals you are progressing towards. You can always expand your horizons by adding additional landing pages over time. It’s easy to grow, and you can do it at a pace that suits your business.