How many pages does a website need for SEO?
You have a homepage, a pricing page and an about page, and you cannot tell whether that is enough.
Every page is a door, and most doors are never used
A page ranks for the query it answers. One page cannot answer sixty queries well. If your product does sixty jobs, sixty pages is an honest description of it and sixty separate chances to be found.
You cannot pick which door people use
75.4% of this site's clicks came from five pages, and nothing in the planning identified which five. The only way to have the winner is to have built it, which means building things you expect to fail.
The limit is genuine difference, not a number
Pages that differ only by a substituted noun are one page repeated, and they will be treated accordingly. The count is only ever a consequence of how many distinct jobs you genuinely do.
160 pages, and five of them did the work
This site ended the window with 160 indexed pages. 75.4% of every click went to five of them. 93 of 160 pages earned fewer than 10 clicks. The correct reading is not that the other pages were wasted, some of them fed the winners internal links, but that page count was never the variable driving the outcome.
Add pages only when you can say who it is for
The test before publishing: name the exact query, and name what this page does that the current page one does not. If you cannot answer both in one sentence, the page will join the long tail of pages that exist and do nothing. That test would have cut this site's page count substantially and cost it almost no traffic.
Measured, not asserted
160 pages, of which 93 of 160 earned fewer than ten clicks in 224 days, and five earned 75.4% of everything.
Free tool for this: Internal Link Graph. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 6 and Chapter 3 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.