42.6% of Small Business Web Pages Have Fewer Than 300 Words

A customer wants to know whether a bakery makes custom wedding cakes, how far ahead to order and roughly what one costs. The bakery's website shows a gallery of beautiful cakes, a phone number and a two-line caption. The customer has to call, or more likely clicks the next result, where a competitor answers all three questions on one page.

A page with fewer than 300 words, counting the menu and footer, rarely has room to answer a buyer's questions. It also gives Google little to go on when deciding which searches the page should appear for. Text is how a page tells both people and search engines what you do, where you do it and why you are the right choice.

Across 5,120 small business websites, 42.6% of pages fall below 300 words, and 16.6% of websites have no page above that line. The pattern follows the type of business: companies that sell with pictures publish the thinnest pages, and companies that sell with explanations publish the longest.

On September 23 and 24, 2026 we read up to 20 pages from each of 5,120 US small business websites, taken from Google business listings across 56 industries. That gave 63,265 live pages. For each page we counted the words of visible text, including navigation and footer text, and measured the share of pages under 300 and under 100 words, the median and average length, and the share per website.

We also split the pages by industry, by click depth and by website platform. Click depth is how many clicks a page sits from the homepage: a page linked from the main menu is one click deep, a page linked from that page is two. The median is the middle page: half have more words, half have fewer. A "thin" page in this study is one with fewer than 300 words.

The typical page is short. The median small business web page has 372 words, and 15.5% of pages have fewer than 100, not much more than a menu, a heading and a footer. The average of 619 words is well above the median because a minority of long pages, such as detailed service pages and blog posts, pull it up.

Counted website by website, the picture is worse. On the average small business website, 48.5% of pages are under 300 words, and 16.6% of websites have no page at all that reaches 300. For those businesses, there is no single page that explains what they do in any depth, so every search that needs an explanation goes to someone else.

The top of the list is made up of businesses that sell with pictures: tattoo shops, photographers, bakeries, restaurants and hair salons. Their websites are built around galleries and menus, with short captions in between. The median photographer web page has 99.5 words, and the median tattoo shop page 152.

At the other end are businesses that sell with explanation. Pest control, financial advisors, movers and plumbers have fewer than a quarter of their pages under 300 words, and their median pages run from 572 to 710 words. Their customers need to understand a process, a price or a risk before they call, so their pages grow to answer those questions. For a visual business, adding a short block of text to each key page is often the cheapest content gain on the website.

Homepages are not the thinnest pages. 38.5% of small business homepages are under 300 words, with a median of 410, and pages one click away are similar at 41%. Two clicks deep, the share rises to 58.8%, and three or more clicks deep it reaches 77.5%, with a median of 121 words. The further a page sits from the homepage, the less attention it gets when the website is written.

Platform makes a difference too. On WordPress websites, 33.5% of pages are under 300 words, with a median of 476. On Wix websites the share is 61.8%, with a median of 217. Wix pages are nearly twice as likely to be thin, so owners on image-led templates should check their key pages first.

Pick the five pages that matter most for sales, usually the homepage and your main service or product pages. If any has fewer than 300 words of real text, add a section that answers the questions customers ask on the phone: price range, process, timing, area served and what makes you different.

If you run a visual business, keep the gallery and add text beside it: a paragraph on each style or service, what it costs to start and how to book. Then work down the website. Pages two and three clicks deep are the thinnest, so give each one that should rank in search a clear purpose and enough text to serve it, and merge or remove the rest.

Do not pad pages to hit a number. Write down the ten questions customers ask most often, and you have the outline. Suff Digital's seo copywriting services turn that list into service pages that answer buyers and rank.

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