The five-page site that beats the fifteen-page one
Small businesses inherit big-business site maps. Somewhere along the way a template arrived with fifteen pages in it, and the pages got filled because they were there, not because anyone needed them.
The five that earn their keep: the door, the thing you sell, the proof, the people, and the way to start. Everything a small business actually needs to say fits in those, and each one can then be good rather than merely present.
The ten that go are rarely deleted outright. They are folded — three thin service pages become one page with three sections, four news posts become a journal, and a page that existed only to hold a phone number becomes a line in the footer.
The immediate gain is maintenance. A five-page site can be kept accurate by one person in an hour. A fifteen-page site drifts, and a site with a wrong price on page eleven costs more trust than the page ever earned.
The second gain is harder to measure and easier to feel. A visitor who can hold the whole site in their head knows where they are, and someone who knows where they are is far more likely to get to the end.