How many links belong on a bio page
The honest answer is a number rather than a philosophy. It is smaller than most people expect, and the reason has little to do with taste.
What a list does as it grows
A short list gets read. A long list gets scanned. The switch happens somewhere around five or six items. After it, people take in the first two or three, glance at the last one, and treat the rest as a wall. The middle of a long list is dead space. Adding to it does not add reach. It adds length.
The arithmetic feels wrong: ten links look like twice the opportunity of five. In practice the tenth mostly makes the second harder to find, and the second was doing the work.
| A page of five links | A page of twenty links | |
|---|---|---|
| Visible without scrolling | All of them | Roughly the first three or four |
| Where attention goes | Across the whole list | The top, and whatever sits last |
| Effect of adding one more | Changes the page | Almost none |
| Upkeep | A minute or two a month | Dead links you stop noticing |
| Something out of date | Obvious at a glance | Easy to miss for months |
Neither column is a moral position. A long page is the right shape for some people — a label with forty artists, a shop with real breadth, an archive people arrive at knowing what they want. The problem is that long pages are almost never chosen. They happen.
Group instead of adding a fourth similar link
The moment you want a fourth link of the same kind as the other three — a fourth single, a fourth city, a fourth article — the problem is not the link. It is the absence of structure. A heading turns four items into one thing with four parts, and a reader takes in one thing far more easily than four separate ones.
- Listen — the streaming services, under one heading, in a single run.
- Dates — the tour in chronological order, with the finished dates hidden rather than deleted.
- Read — the writing, newest first, three at most.
Three groups of four read shorter than twelve loose rows, though the page is exactly as tall. A heading also does something a link cannot: it tells the visitor whether this section is for them, so they can skip it without reading every line.
A list or a grid
A grid of cards works when the links are visual and comparable. A catalogue of products, a portfolio, releases with cover art. The image does the labelling, the eye moves in two directions instead of one, and eight items in a grid feel like a set rather than a queue.
A grid is worse when the links are text-heavy. A card built around a long title becomes a small paragraph in a box, and a screen of those is harder to read than the same titles as plain rows. Switching layout between list and grid takes a moment, so try it, but judge it on one question: if you would have to explain each card in words, use a list.
One featured card instead of five ordinary rows
If a page has a genuine priority, promoting it beats surrounding it. A large featured card with an image at the top does more than five ordinary rows below, because it is the only element on the screen that does not have to compete for the glance. Size and image together answer "what is this" before the visitor has read the label.
The failure mode is featuring several things at once. Two large cards are simply two cards; four are a page with no top. Emphasis is relative, and it is spent the moment it is shared. One featured item above plain rows beats five shouting at the same volume.
Rotate rather than accumulate
Most long pages were never designed. They accumulated, one launch at a time, and nothing ever came off. The alternative is a fixed budget: decide how many links the page holds, and when something new goes on, something old comes off. Hiding a block rather than deleting it makes that painless, since an off-season link keeps its wording and its image until it is relevant again.
Rotation also keeps the page honest. A visitor who finds a dead campaign at the top learns that nothing here is current, and that lesson is expensive. Five links you maintain are worth more than twenty you have stopped looking at.