How many pages should a small business website have?

There's no fixed number — what matters is coverage, not page count. As a baseline, most small business sites benefit from a homepage, a dedicated page per core service, an about page, a contact page, and (for multi-area businesses) a page per location served. More pages aren't automatically better, but thin, generic pages that don't add unique value can actively hurt SEO — genuinely useful, unique content per page is what counts.