A small business website does its whole job in about five pages, and the number is the wrong thing to worry about. What goes on each page, and the order a stranger meets them in, is the decision that actually matters, and it is the one most people skip while they argue over how many pages to have. So the useful question is not how big your site should be. It is which pages earn their place, and which are there because a template had a slot for them.
Start with the set that nearly every small business needs. A home page that says what you do, who it is for, and what to do next. A page on what you actually offer. Something that proves you can do it, whether that is your work or a couple of real results. A page on who is behind the business, because people buy from people they can place. And a way to get in touch. That is most sites, in full. Each of those pages is there because a real visitor needs it to decide, not because a bigger site looks more serious.
The pages that cause trouble are the ones that pile up without anyone deciding to add them. A separate page for every service you offer. A page for each person on the team. A news feed last touched two years ago. A resources section nobody opens. Each one felt responsible at the time and now sits there as upkeep you owe forever, splitting both your attention and the visitor's. A site does not become more credible by getting bigger. Usually it goes the other way, and the two pages that actually bring in work end up buried under the ones that do not.
The obvious worry is search: surely more pages mean more chances to rank. Only the right pages do. A page helps you in Google when it genuinely answers something a customer types, and hurts you when it is thin and only there to pad the menu. Ten near-empty service pages work against you. A few pages that each cover a real question work for you. A blog is the same bargain written large: worth real money if you will actually feed it, dead weight the moment you stop. Add a page for a reason you can say out loud, never to reach a number.
Then there is the one-page site, which is a fair call more often than people expect. If you have a single offer and one kind of customer, a single scrolling page can do everything a five-page site would, faster and cheaper. It starts to cost you the day you need to rank for more than your own name, or you pick up a second type of customer who needs a different pitch. Pick the shape from what your visitor has to do, not from a rule about how real websites look.
The count, then, is the easy part. Anyone can write down five page names in a minute. The work worth paying for is deciding what belongs on each page and in what order a stranger meets it. That is information architecture, and it is invisible when it is right and costly when it is wrong. Done well, a visitor lands and finds the one thing they came for without having to think. Done badly, you have five tidy pages and an empty inbox, which is exactly where a lot of homemade sites quietly sit.
So before you brief a build, or start dragging boxes around in a builder, do not begin with a list of pages. Write down the handful of things a visitor must be able to do on your site, then work out the fewest pages that let them do it. If that comes to five, build five and stop. If you cannot tell whether a page earns its place or just feels like one a proper business ought to have, that is the judgement worth borrowing from someone who has watched which pages bring in work and which only ever sit there.