Landing Page or Full Business Website? What You Actually Need

About half the people who contact me ask for a "website" when what they actually need is a landing page. A smaller group asks for a landing page when their business genuinely needs a full site. Both mistakes cost money - the first one costs it upfront, the second one costs it slowly, in enquiries that never arrive.

So here's the framework I walk every prospective client through. It takes about five minutes and it starts with one question.

What is the website's job?

Not "what should it look like." What is its job. A website is an employee. You're hiring it to do something specific, and the something determines the size of the hire.

If the job is: capture leads for one offer, promote one campaign, validate one idea, or collect signups for one product - that's a landing page. One page, one message, one call to action. Adding more pages to that job doesn't help. It actively hurts, because every extra navigation link is an exit door for a visitor who was one scroll away from filling in your form.

If the job is: establish credibility for a business with multiple services, rank in search for more than a couple of keywords, or answer the questions a buyer researches before they ever contact you - that's a business website. Five to ten pages, each one targeting a different question or search intent.

The mismatch failures look like this. A consultant with six service lines crams them all onto one landing page, and visitors leave confused because the page is trying to say everything to everyone. Or a founder pre-launch orders a ten-page site for a product that doesn't exist yet, and spends weeks writing an "About" page nobody will read while competitors are already collecting emails.

What each one costs, honestly

I work fixed-price, so I can give you real numbers instead of "it depends."

A landing page starts at €500 and takes 1-2 weeks. That gets you a custom design (not a template), a mobile-first layout, a contact form with email notifications, and SEO and performance optimisation. One month of post-launch support included.

A business website starts at €1,500 and takes 2-4 weeks. That's 5-10 custom-designed pages, a CMS so you can update content yourself, a blog or portfolio section, analytics and conversion tracking, and optional multilingual support. Two months of support included.

Full details are on the pricing page, and either way you see a complete design mockup and the exact price before paying anything. If the mockup isn't right, you've spent nothing.

The 3x price difference isn't padding. A business website is genuinely more work: information architecture, more copy to structure, a CMS to set up, and internal linking that actually helps you rank. When someone only needs a landing page, I tell them so. Selling a €1,500 site to someone with a €500 problem is a good way to earn one payment and zero referrals.

The SEO difference nobody mentions

Here's the trade-off that matters most long-term. A landing page can rank for roughly one search intent. It's a sniper rifle: excellent at converting the traffic you send to it from ads, social, or email, but it will rarely generate meaningful organic traffic on its own.

A business website is how you compound. Each service page targets its own keywords. A blog answers the questions your customers type into Google at 11pm. My own publication, DevOpsNess, is 400+ articles deep - I've watched first-hand how content accumulates search traffic month over month while a single page just... sits there.

So if your growth plan is "run ads to a page," a landing page is the correct tool and a full site is wasted spend. If your plan is "get found in search over the next year or two," a landing page will quietly starve you.

Start small, upgrade later - it's a feature, not a compromise

The good news: this isn't a one-way door, and I deliberately build it that way.

Every landing page I ship is built on the same stack as my larger projects - Next.js, React, TypeScript, deployed on Vercel. When a landing page client comes back six months later saying "it's working, we need more," we don't throw anything away. The page becomes the homepage, we add service pages, a CMS, and a blog around it, and you pay roughly the difference rather than starting over.

Compare that to the usual pattern: a cheap page-builder landing page that has to be scrapped entirely the moment the business outgrows it.

My honest default recommendation, if you're unsure: start with the landing page. €500 and two weeks buys you real data about whether your offer converts. That data makes every subsequent decision - including whether to invest €1,500+ in a full site - dramatically easier. The only people I steer straight to a business website are established businesses with existing demand, multiple services, and a clear search-traffic play.

The five-minute test

Answer these:

1. Do you have one offer or several?
2. Will traffic come from ads/outreach, or does it need to come from Google?
3. Does anyone need to update content weekly without a developer?
4. Is the business validated, or are you still testing?

Mostly "one offer, paid traffic, rarely updated, still testing" - landing page. Mostly "several services, organic search, frequent updates, established" - business website. Mixed answers are exactly the situation worth a short conversation.

If you want a straight recommendation for your specific case, send me a message with what the site needs to do. I'll tell you the smallest scope that solves it - even if that's the cheaper option.