Startup website structure: the pages you need at each stage

What pages should a startup website have?

It should have the pages that answer visitors' questions, in the order they ask them: what do you do, for whom, how does it work, what does it cost, who are you, how do I reach you. The table below is the map we use ourselves when we plan a startup site, with the question each page answers and the stage at which it earns its place.

Information architecture

How content and pages are organised, grouped and linked: navigation, hierarchy, URLs, internal links. It decides how quickly a person, or a search engine, finds what they came for.

How should the structure change from idea to seed?

It grows with what you can prove: fewer pages early on, more evidence as customers arrive. Building a mature company's website on day one is a classic way to waste a pre-seed budget, because you end up filling pages with promises instead of facts.

Idea stage: one landing page

One page that describes the problem, the solution you have in mind and a form to leave an email or book a call. The goal is learning, not persuasion; how to build it and what to measure is in our guide to a landing page to validate a startup idea.

Launch and pre-seed: the complete minimum site

Homepage, product, pricing, about, contact and legal pages. Six good pages beat twenty thin ones. If you are incorporating in Italy as an innovative startup, there are specific disclosure duties too; see website requirements for Italian innovative startups.

Seed and beyond: proof, content, people

Use cases with real customers, a resources section that earns search traffic, a careers page. If you sell or raise across borders, this is also when a second language pays off. Search becomes a channel in its own right; start with our guide to SEO for startups.

What should a startup homepage say?

It should say in one sentence what you do, for whom and with what result, before any animation plays. The rest of the page exists to remove doubts, in the order they arise.

1. The promise: a headline with the customer's outcome, a subhead with the how, one primary action.
2. The problem, described in the customer's words rather than yours.
3. How it works in three or four steps, with images of the real product.
4. The proof you genuinely have: customers, real numbers, press, awards. If you have none yet, show the team and the method, never invented testimonials.
5. The objections buyers raise, answered: price, timing, data security, integrations.
6. A second call to action at the bottom, for those who read everything.

Google's guidance on helpful content asks, among other things, whether it is self-evident who created the content and whether the site offers background about who publishes it, for example through an About page. For an unknown startup that matters twice over: people who have never heard of you want to know who is behind the product.

How should you organise navigation and URLs?

Organise them around stable topics, with readable addresses and a short main menu. Google's SEO Starter Guide notes that grouping similar topics in directories helps Google understand a site, that URLs made of random identifiers are less helpful, and that Google mainly finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled.

• Five or six items in the main menu at most; everything else in the footer.
• Short, descriptive URLs in logical folders: /product, /pricing, /blog/article-name.
• Every important page reachable through a link from another page, not only from the menu.
• Language versions on separate URLs with hreflang annotations; Google's localisation guidance says each version must list itself and all the others.

Mobile is the majority, but desktop is far from dead, and your own split may look nothing like the national one: a B2B startup can see most visits from laptops, a consumer brand almost none. Design the structure for both and measure both. Google suggests tracking Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented by mobile and desktop, with the main content rendered within 2.5 seconds.

How do we plan a website's structure?

Which website structure mistakes should you avoid?

• Empty pages to look bigger: a “Partners” or “Investors” section with nothing in it backfires.
• One endless page once you serve several customer segments; each deserves its own page and URL.
• Hidden pricing behind “contact us” with no hint of how pricing works.
• The blog as a storage room: posts disconnected from product pages rarely bring customers.
• Forgotten legal pages: the first contact form already needs a privacy notice and cookie handling; in the UK, the ICO is clear that you must explain cookies and get consent for non-essential ones.

If you are planning budget alongside structure, the cost drivers are in startup website cost.