The 7 Pages Every Website Needs (and What Goes on Each)

New site owners pour everything into content and treat the "boring" pages — about, contact, privacy — as chores to fill in later. That ordering is backwards. Three different audiences judge your site by its scaffolding before they judge your writing: first-time visitors deciding in seconds whether you are legitimate, Google's quality systems looking for signals of who is behind the content, and human reviewers at ad networks who reject applications over a missing privacy policy. This guide covers the seven pages that do that structural work and what actually belongs on each.

Why structural pages matter more than they look

Three reasons, in rising order of directness:

• Visitor trust. A site with no identifiable owner and no way to make contact reads as disposable. Visitors rarely articulate this — they just bounce faster and never link you.
• Search quality signals. Google's quality rater guidelines explicitly instruct raters to look for information about who is responsible for a site. That is the practical core of E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust): an about page that names a real operator and a contact page that works are the cheapest trust signals you can ship.
• Monetisation reviews. When you apply to an ad network — AdSense or any of the premium networks — a reviewer opens your site and checks for exactly these pages. A privacy policy that discloses third-party advertising cookies is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have. Sites get rejected for this while their content is perfectly fine.

The seven pages, one by one

1. Homepage

Your homepage has one job: tell a stranger what the site does in one sentence, then give them one obvious next step. Ours says it plainly — free PNG to JPG conversion — and puts the tool itself above the fold. Whatever your site does, resist the urge to open with a mission statement. State the promise, show the way in, and keep the page fast: unoptimised images are the number-one reason homepages load slowly, and a slow first impression undoes everything else on this list.

2. About page

The about page answers the question every wary visitor and every quality rater is silently asking: who runs this, and why should I trust them on this topic? Name a person or a team, state your relevant experience in concrete terms, and say why the site exists. We wrote a full breakdown of the six elements of an about page that builds trust, and if you want a solid draft in a few minutes, our free About Us Page Generator produces one from a short questionnaire — a far better starting point than a blank editor.

3. Contact page

The test is simple: can a stranger reach a human? A contact form beats a bare email address for two reasons — it works even when the visitor's device has no mail client configured, and it does not hand your address to every scraper that crawls the page. Add an email address too if you can face the spam, but the form is the baseline. Then actually monitor the inbox: ad networks, potential partners and copyright holders all use this channel, and silence reads as abandonment.

4. Privacy policy

This is the page with legal weight. Once your site uses analytics, a contact form or advertising, you are collecting personal data, and most jurisdictions — the EU under GDPR, California under CCPA, and many others — require you to disclose it. In plain terms, your policy must say:

• What you collect — form submissions, server logs, analytics identifiers.
• Cookies — which are set, by whom, and for what purpose.
• Third parties — analytics providers and, critically, ad networks. Google requires publishers to disclose that third-party vendors use cookies to serve personalised ads.
• User rights and contact — how someone requests access to or deletion of their data, and who to ask.

Write it in language a normal person can read. A short, accurate policy beats ten pages of borrowed legalese.

5. Terms and conditions

Where the privacy policy protects your visitors, the terms page protects you. It is where you limit liability ("this content is provided as-is"), assert ownership of your content, set acceptable-use rules for any tools, and reserve the right to change or discontinue the service. For a content site the stakes are modest; for a site offering tools or downloads, a terms page is what stands between you and a claim that your free utility damaged someone's files. Honest drafting now is cheap insurance.

6. A 404 page that helps

Every site accumulates broken inbound links — old bookmarks, typos, pages you renamed. The default server 404 is a dead end that loses the visitor entirely. A good 404 apologises briefly and offers routes back in: your homepage, your most popular sections, ideally a search box. Our own 404 page links straight to the converter, the resizer and the guides index — the places a lost visitor most likely wanted. It takes an hour to build and recovers traffic forever.

7. Your cornerstone content page

The seventh essential page is not administrative at all: it is the single piece of content that proves your site's depth — the comprehensive guide, the definitive comparison, the resource competitors link to instead of writing their own. It gives visitors a reason to stay, gives other pages something substantial to link to, and shows Google genuine expertise. On this site, deep references like our complete guide to image formats play that role. Pick your best topic and go deeper than anyone else has bothered to.

Who each page is really for

Every page serves everyone a little, but each has a primary audience — and that audience dictates its one non-negotiable element:

The failure modes that cost real money

The most damaging mistake is placeholder legal text copied from another site, complete with the other site's name still in it. This is genuinely worse than having no policy at all: a missing page looks unfinished, but a policy naming a different company proves you never read your own legal text, and both ad reviewers and sharp-eyed visitors spot it instantly. Other repeat offenders:

• A contact form that posts into the void because nobody wired up or monitors the inbox.
• An about page written entirely in vague third-person marketing voice, naming no one.
• A privacy policy that predates the analytics and ad scripts actually running on the site.
• Structural pages that exist but are linked from nowhere, so neither crawlers nor visitors find them.

Where to link them: nav vs footer

Convention has already settled this. Your main navigation carries what visitors actively want: your tools or product, your content sections, and usually the about page. Your footer carries what people look for only when they need it: privacy policy, terms, contact — every visitor knows to scroll down for these, and ad reviewers look there first. Keep both site-wide: reviewers expect a privacy policy reachable from every page, and a footer link costs nothing. The 404 page needs no link at all; the cornerstone page deserves links from everywhere it is relevant.

The bottom line

Seven pages, one afternoon of honest work, and three audiences satisfied at once. Start with the about page — it is the highest-leverage trust signal and the easiest to get wrong by writing nothing. Then work down the list, checking each page against its must-have element in the table above. None of this replaces good content — but it decides whether that content gets the trust, rankings and ad approval it deserves.