A single page website is a website that has only 1 html page or 1 page where all site content can be accessed.
What this means is that the site will have a standard navigation menu but instead of clicking through to individual pages like: about, services, contact etc.. the menu items instead scroll or “jump” down to the corresponding section within a single page only.
While this may seem like the “in thing” and create a beautiful or stunning effect it can be appealing to some website owners and certainly can work if you don’t care about launching a full steam SEO campaign and just want users to find your brand. However single page websites do have several disadvantages:
Generally each page of a website should only target a single keyword phrase which strongly plays into SEO (search engine optimisation) so if you have several keyword terms that you want to rank for it would be very difficult to do this on a single page website as each page should really only focus on 1 theme or topic in order to really benefit from any SEO.
Multiple page websites do not have this limitation and have a way better chance of ranking higher in search engines due to the multiple pages it has. Each individual web page is able to target a keyword or phrase thus increasing the chances of being found through search engines. This would be very important for businesses that have high competition and need to cover all bases; where every keyword phrase matters.
Since you only have 1 page to present well rounded content on all of your services this can be very difficult to achieve on a single page. You will end up with a clutter of information that is crammed on page and can pose usability problems especially on mobile devices. It is far better to have dedicated pages for your services that span across a few pages – just don’t spread the content too thin!
The more content you try and squeeze into your single page website (images, content, videos), the heavier the page. Page loading speed is indeed a ranking factor used by search engines. So will your clients put up with the load-times or will they click away from your site?
A single page website only gets one set of meta data (page description & title). You have just a single title tag with a limit of about 23 words to quickly entice potential customers and turn them into actual clients. So, your description and title tags would need to be amazing.
Obviously a single page website has no real capacity to link to internal pages, meaning you have no chance of interconnecting content which would otherwise provide a rich source of SEO if done effectively.
A single page website is great if you only care about limited SEO and just want a glorified business card as your website, or for people to find your brand. You could always add a blog to a single page site which would give you the opportunity to create dynamic content. But generally speaking for business owners that are serious about being found online a single page site is not really going to do you any favours and limits the digital marketing opportunities that exist for multi-page sites.
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