One of the latest hot trends these days is the concept of having single page website. It may be good idea to find out first What exactly is a One Page Website? In this article we want to bring more light whether it has any pros and cons.
Is Single Page Website really good for conversion? Let's find out more about its advantages and disadvantages.
Every website is built with one primary objective. To generate new leads and to grow online business, to increase product awareness, to drive more downloads, to sell more goods and services and so on.
Single Page Websites look modern, creative and certainly has many advantages. It’s simple, engaging and straightforward design combined with a great story and intuitive transition drives site visitors to spend more time and ultimately improves conversion. It is more focused than a multipage website and its elegant look and feel gives visitors a great browsing experience.
Single Page Website Advantages
1. It Encourages Users To Scroll
We build website to communicate with our current and future customers with ultimate objective to increase business. One question that always pop up in our mind is that how do we increase business? The best answer is By Telling A Story!
Stories are simply the best element to deliver the message that are not only heard and understood but that inspire, motivate and compel visitors to take action. With the single page website, we have opportunity to create appealing, immersive, interactive and touchy experience that creates bridge for people to move from traditional web design to modern web design era. Creativity and uniqueness in website always gets users attentions and encourage them to stay long. You can implement attractive HD videos, sliders, parallax animation and while scrolling down each of these elements are presented in full screen across screens of various sizes. This does create visually appealing effects which people like to see.
2. It Is Intuitive And Easy To Digest
Along with creativity the smartest way to use Singe Page Website is by talking straight to the point. The top banners and background videos can be nicely used to present your business offerings or message in slider about what you do and the skills you specialize in. Old fashioned website used to be more text content oriented but Single Page Modern websites gives opportunity to display interactive media content in the best possible way.
The straightforward design gives great seamless experience that reduces time of visitor trying to navigate and getting information from several layers if internal pages. And because this format forces the business owner to signify their vision into single page, the overall message would be clearer and more powerful than otherwise it could have been scattered between home page, about us page, mission and sidebar etc.
3. Decreases Bounce Rate
Single Page Website is famous for lower bounce rate. The reasons are simple. It’s quick, to the point and you hardly have to spend time going to another page and filling out form. Selecting the right content is the key. High resolution graphics, compelling videos and great punch lines are major factors to create appealing website which can hook up visitors to stay long enough. The more time people spend it’s better for conversion.
4. It Looks Good On Almost All Devices
Single page design creates uniformity across platforms where users of any devices can easily scroll the content and gets easy access to website. Due to it’s limitations designers and developers come up with new creative ideas that separates them from common multiple pages websites. This results in new kind of interaction in digital environment like swipe gesture, pop out menus, animations and great graphics etc.
Single page website can do many things for the web by offering a simple, intuitive user experience and delightful and out of the box web interactions. This can be accomplished by utilizing a modern design concept called Responsive website. This will not only ensure that your design adjust in size to any digital devices but also looks awesome when viewed any device.
5. Cost
Price is one crucial element of any project. Although this would still depend on project requirement. Creating custom multiple pages website may be expensive in some cases compared to a Single Page Website. For very simple SPW cost can be less and ideally it would be a great option for individuals or business who need simple site. However there can be more advance creativity and functionality applied to single page site which can increase cost depending on the nature of advance features.
Single page website can take less development time. And also because it is a single page website, it will eat less web space and bandwidth which will turn reduce your hosting cost.
Have a look on its disadvantage
1. Content
Single page is limited in the amount of Content it can take up compared to multiple pages website. So it’s really ideal to display animations and creativity and can fit best in form of a brochure site while and can’t really fit in requirements of all type of websites. This may impact SEO as well as there may be no internal page to have the interlinking between various pages.
2. Limited Meta Descriptions
Since there is only a single page, it can be the reason to have only one meta title and one meta description, which means you are somehow limited to focus on your primary keywords only and you may not be able to take advantage of low hanging fruit keywords.
If you have one product or service, this would be perfect.
3. Limited Analytical Information
Having all information on single page can make it difficult to assemble analytical data. In order to increase your website traffic and sales, visitors behavior data is most important. It is often necessary to look into information such as bounce rate, time spent on each page and where traffic is being lost. With the help of these important reports, you can further proceed to make relevant and necessary changes to your website.
This valuable information can be difficult to get when it is all related to single page.
4. Difficult To Add New Information more flexibly
Yes, of course you can add additional information in your single page website but it can lead to design break. Possibly it can also make the page too long which can risk losing your users interest. Additionally due to the size of the page, it may take much longer to load than a regular website, which can be the reason of high bounce rate. Websites taking more than 2 or 3 seconds to load can have lower ranking in search engines.
So for businesses which are likely to expand products or services in near future, single page website isn’t for you.
5. Google And JavaScript
Many single page website looks so elegant and fantastic on browsers due to the use of JavaScript but this is not something which is easily crawled by search engines. Whilst Google’s Matt Cutts has suggested in his video that “Google has Gotten Better at Handling JavaScript”, but this is still being questioned within the industry. Here is the video of Matt Cutts about Single Page Website.
Final Words
Google themselves are fans of the one-page and like to mix the two. Look at this example: to tell the story of “How Search Works” Google has a fabulous one single-page scroller and they have added additional page with videos to have better understanding of related topics like Crawling & Indexing, algorithms, Fighting spam and Polices.
So we can say that single page website cannot focus on one specific topic. But the fact that single page websites are so popular these days and they are sharable. Please visit this link http://www.awwwards.com/websites/single-page/ here you will find the best collection of single page websites.
With the right idea, creative person and direction, single page website can win the show and what i think is they will just get better and improve over time as we get better.
If your concerned about SEO, then there are several technical aspects available through which you can make your single page website search engine friendly and digestible. Here are the few essentials:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21862054/single-page-application-advantages-and-disadvantages
http://www.awwwards.com/seo-tricks-for-one-page-websites.html