Website, web page and web site: what is the difference?

A web page is one document with one address, such as the contact page or a single blog post. A website is the whole set of pages that live under one domain name and link to each other.

Think of a book and its pages. The book is what people remember and judge; the page is what they actually land on. Most visitors from Google arrive on an inner page, not your home page, so every page has to make sense to someone who has seen nothing else on the site.

A domain is the name, like yourbusiness.ca. A URL is the full address of one page on it. Hosting is the computer that stores the files. A home page is only one page of the website, the one at the root address. A landing page is a page built to get one action, such as a call or a form submission, and it often sits outside the main navigation.

A subdomain, like shop.yourbusiness.ca, is usually treated by search engines as a separate site from the main one. That matters if someone proposes putting your blog or store on a subdomain. A folder, like yourbusiness.ca/blog/, stays part of the same website.

"Web site" with a space is the older spelling. "Website" as one word is standard now, and it is what you will see on business sites and in most style guides. The meaning is identical, so use the one-word form unless a particular editor tells you otherwise.

The site title is the name of the whole website: your business name or the name of your blog. An article title, or page title, is the headline of one page or post, such as "How much does a website cost?". In WordPress you set the site title once under Settings and each page title on the page itself.

There is a third thing, the title tag, which is what appears as the blue link in Google results. It often starts as the page title plus the site name, and you can edit it separately. Write it for the person searching: say what the page is, keep it to roughly 60 characters so it is not cut off, and do not give every page the same one.

Quotes get confusing when the words are loose. "A five page website" and "five web pages" can be very different jobs. Ask what pages are included, whether blog posts and legal pages count, what is built from scratch and what is a template, and who writes the text.

To see how many pages your site really has, type site:yourbusiness.ca into Google, or open the Pages report in Search Console. The number is often higher than owners expect, because old posts, tag archives and test pages count too. Each of those is a page Google may judge your whole website by.

It matters for search as well. Google ranks pages, not websites, so each service or product you want found usually needs its own page with its own topic. One page trying to cover everything ranks for little. The site as a whole then supports those pages through clear navigation, internal links, speed and trust signals like a real address and contact details.

A single page can work for a very small job: an event, a pre-launch signup, a sole trader with one service and a phone number. It is cheap and quick. The limit is that one page can only target one search topic, and it gives you nowhere to grow.

If customers compare you with competitors, or you offer several services or locations, you want a website with a page per service. Our websites start from $3,500 and take about 3 to 4 weeks. If you are not sure which you need, tell us what you sell and where, and we will say honestly whether a few pages will do.