Which type of website does your business actually need?
Choose the type by what has to be findable separately. Anything you want to rank on its own — a location, a course, a service, a product — needs its own URL. That decision sets the URL architecture, which is the hardest thing to change later.
Key takeaways
- Content without its own URL cannot rank, however good it is.
- One page listing eleven branches can win one ranking, not eleven.
- A translate widget produces no indexable pages and does nothing for search.
- Ask who adds the eleventh page, and how long it takes them.
Most disappointment with a website comes from being sold the shape that suited the agency rather than the shape that suited the business. Design can be changed later; URL architecture is the expensive one.
The seven shapes
- Landing page
- One offer, one action, built for a campaign. Right when speed to launch matters more than breadth, and when the ad's promise has to be repeated in the H1.
- Brochure / business site
- The main site a company sells through. Right for most established businesses, and the default that is genuinely correct more often than agencies admit.
- Multi-location site
- An indexable page per branch with its own address, hours, staff and schema. The only structure that lets a chain compete in each local pack — see multi-location websites.
- Multilingual site
- Real per-language URLs with hreflang, not a browser widget. Covered in multilingual website development.
- Booking site
- Availability, confirmation and reminders wired to the calendar your staff already use, rather than a second one to check.
- Directory / marketplace
- Server-rendered listing pages with structured data and sitemaps that update themselves, so the catalogue becomes a traffic source rather than a cost.
- Portal
- A logged-in area with roles, documents, notifications and an access log. Closer to software than to a website.
The question that decides it
What has to be findable on its own? Search engines award rankings to URLs. A five-branch clinic with one Locations page can rank once. A course provider with a single Courses page cannot rank for any individual course. The content exists — it is simply stored somewhere Google cannot award a ranking to.
Custom build or a CMS?
Use a CMS (Webflow, WordPress)
- Five to fifteen pages that change rarely
- Your marketing team wants to restructure pages themselves
- No logged-in area, no custom data
- Budget matters more than milliseconds
Build it (Next.js)
- Many pages generated from a data source
- Real traffic where speed moves revenue
- A logged-in area, or data the site has to read and write
- Programmatic pages — location, course, product at scale
We recommend a CMS regularly and lose the project; it is still the right advice when the site is mostly content. The comparison in full is in Next.js vs WordPress, and the range of shapes we build is on Websites of Every Kind.