A client came to us with a twenty-one page website and a feeling that something was wrong. Traffic was fine. Nothing was broken. But the site felt heavy to them, like a house with too many rooms to clean. They were right. We finished the redesign with five pages, and in the months since, no one has asked where the other sixteen went.
Here is the accounting, because the specifics are more useful than the principle.
The pages that left
There was an About page, a Team page, and a Our Story page. Three pages telling one story three times. We kept one, the shortest, and folded the two useful sentences from the others into it.
There was a Blog with four posts, the most recent from nineteen months earlier. A blog nobody writes is not a blog; it is a date stamp announcing neglect. We removed it. If they start writing again, we will add it back — as a thing that is alive, not a thing that was.
There were Services, What We Do, and Solutions — again, one idea wearing three hats. There was a Testimonials page that held quotes better placed beside the work they praised. There was an FAQ answering questions the site itself, written clearly, would never raise. There was a Press page linking to two articles. There was a Resources page that had become a graveyard for PDFs.
None of these were bad pages. They were just pages that existed because removing them had never been anyone’s job.
The five that stayed
Home, which now loads one clear statement and one path forward. Work, where the testimonials moved, attached to the projects they describe. Studio, which absorbed the three about-pages into one honest paragraph. Journal, kept deliberately small and only if they would write. And Begin, a single way to start a conversation.
Five pages. Every one of them used.
Why nobody missed the rest
This is the part people find hard to believe, so it is worth being precise about. We did not delete information the reader wanted. We deleted duplication and neglect. The story was still there — once, instead of three times. The proof was still there — next to the work, where it meant more. The way to get in touch was still there, easier to find than before.
What left was the stuff that had been padding the site’s sense of itself. And padding is invisible to remove. You only notice the room is better after the furniture nobody used is gone.
The number that mattered
The site went from twenty-one pages to five. But the number we actually cared about was different: the time from landing on the home page to understanding what this business does and how to engage it. That used to take a few clicks and some reading. Now it takes one screen.
That is the real result of cutting pages. Not a smaller site for its own sake — a faster understanding. The reader gets to the point because we removed the detours.
If your site feels heavy, this is usually why. Not too little. Too much of the wrong, duplicated, half-finished kind. Do the accounting. You will probably find your own sixteen.