Five Pages, One Month: My Experiment in Digital Minimalism

For most of last year, my website was a museum of good intentions. A blog section with three half-finished drafts. A newsletter nobody had signed up for since March. A "speaking" page listing one meetup talk from 2022. Two analytics dashboards I checked compulsively and a comment plugin that had attracted exactly one comment (spam, from a crypto account).

Somewhere along the way, my corner of the internet had become a to-do list I never finished. So in January, I did something drastic: I cut it down to five pages. Home. About. Writing. Projects. Contact. That's it. No plugins, no newsletter embed, no related-posts widget, no cookie banner, no tag system.

I gave myself one month. Here's the field report.

Week One: Withdrawal Symptoms

The first week was genuinely uncomfortable, and that surprised me. Not because the site was worse — it objectively loaded faster and looked cleaner — but because I kept reaching for features that weren't there.

I'd publish a post and instinctively hover where the share buttons used to be. I'd check analytics out of habit and remember there was nothing to check. It turns out a lot of my "engagement" with my own site was really just fidgeting. I was poking at dashboards the way you open the fridge at midnight: not hungry, just restless.

The scariest moment came when I deleted the newsletter signup and my subscriber count was — fine. Nobody noticed. Nobody emailed. The feature I'd been guiltily neglecting for a year had an audience of approximately zero, and removing it cost me nothing.

Week Two: The Traffic Dip That Wasn't

I expected traffic to crater. It didn't. Total visits dropped maybe 10% the first week — mostly bot traffic, as it turned out, and whatever phantom visits the related-posts widget had been generating. By week three, organic traffic was back to baseline.

Here's what did change, and it mattered more: time on page went up, and bounce rate went down. With nothing else to click, people actually finished articles. A few even used the email address on my contact page — an actual human channel — instead of liking a post and vanishing.

One reader replied to a piece I'd written in the fall with three thoughtful paragraphs. That single reply generated more real connection than a year of widget-driven vanity metrics.

Week Three: Publishing Got Easier

This was the part I didn't see coming. With fewer pages and no plugin machinery to maintain, the friction to publishing dropped to almost nothing. I wrote four pieces that week — more than in the previous two months combined.

Part of it was practical: updates took minutes instead of an evening of plugin archaeology. But part of it was psychological. A five-page site feels finishable. Every page is maintained because maintaining it is easy. There's no backlog of broken things whispering at you when you open the editor.

It's the same reason I cook more in a clean kitchen. The mess wasn't a symptom of not publishing — it was the cause.

Week Four: What Stayed and What Didn't

When the month ended, I didn't rebuild anything. Five pages, still. Here's my honest accounting of what the experiment proved:

What I don't miss: analytics dashboards, the newsletter embed, tags, share buttons, the comment system, and — most surprisingly — a homepage hero section I'd spent an entire weekend designing in October.

What I'd never bring back: the plugins. Every single one. My hosting bill is the same, my site loads in under a second, and I've spent zero hours on maintenance since.

What I do miss: honestly, very little. Maybe an archive page for the older essays. I'll get to it — or I won't, and the site will survive.

The Bigger Point

I don't think everyone needs a five-page site. But I think most of us — especially those of us who build things for a living — confuse more site with better site. We add features the way we add tabs to the browser: one at a time, each defensible, the sum quietly overwhelming.

What the month taught me is that a personal site isn't a product. It doesn't need a growth strategy or a feature roadmap. It needs to be easy enough to maintain that you actually maintain it, and honest enough that what's there is really you.

Five pages turned out to be plenty of room for that. Your number might be seven, or three, or twelve. But if your website has started to feel like a chore you're failing at, the answer probably isn't a new feature.

It's a deletion.