Home page, website, web page – what’s the difference? After reading this article, you will know and never mix up these terms again.
I often experience that the terms website, home page, and web presence are simply used synonymously. People don’t actually know that there’s a difference. And if their business is far from being a web worker, how would they know? When talking to anyone working in the web development field, this is when it gets useful understanding the difference, so you avoid pitfalls. So here’s your “website 101”.
What is a website?
A website is an entire online presence on one domain. Thus, this term is indeed equivalent to the term web presence, but can even be seen broader. It can a web presence of a company, a person or a project – or serve another one of many more purposes. The term “website” is composed of the words “web” (= network, abbreviation for World Wide Web) and “site” (= place, location).
Thus, a website is literally a place in the World Wide Web, which includes a home page and usually also other individual web pages. So, the entire World Wide Web is consists of billions of publicly accessible websites. 1.17 billion as of March 2022, to be precise. Interestingly, only 17 % of these websites are active, the rest are just parked domains or similar. So if your website belongs to the currently active 200,000,000 ones, congrats, you’re already sticking out.
What is a web page?
In contrast to a website, a web page does not refer to the entire web presence, but to a subsection of it. Thus, a website usually consists of several web pages. Each of these “subpages” can be reached via its own URL, which usually consists of the domain and the name of this particular web page appended with a slash. Thus, a homepage is also just a specific, single web page.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say your website can be found at the domain “www.your-name.com”. A single web page could then be reached via the URL “www.your-name.com/contact”. On this particular page, you might want to display your contact information.
This way, we’re already approaching the question of why a website mostly even consists of different web pages: to present information in a snackable manner. Each web page serves (or should serve) a goal: On your contact page, you want people to reach out to you.
Fun fact: The actual number of single web pages on the World Wide Web is unknown to us. Estimations vary between 25 and 50 million pages. Can you even imagine such a huge amount? Take good care of each of your pages, or else it will just float around somewhere in the web between all those pages.
An example of a web page is our “About” page on the website you’re visiting right now. The “About” page serves the one single purpose of telling you more about us, the authors of this blog and this website itself:
What is a home page?
A home page is nothing more than a single, albeit particular, web page. This term refers to the home page of a website, i.e., the subpage where the visitor usually lands when entering the domain in the browser. In the menu of a website, the home page is often labeled “Home” or it can be reached by clicking on the logo. Such a home page has the goal to arouse the interest of the website visitor at first sight and to give him a foretaste of the contents of the further web pages / sub-pages.
This is the home page of the website you’re on right now:
People often mistake the home page to be the one and only starting point of someone that gets to their website. One should be aware thought that every single web page of your site can be “page one”. Visitors rarely type in your domain right away, but rather google for something they need to know or land on one of your web pages via social media. So many possibilities to enter, so make sure the user gets the most important information on each of your web pages.
Now that you know the difference between a website, web page and home page, you can choose your words wisely when articulating what you need to get. But don’t worry, web developers will also understand you saying “I need a home page”. 😉