Your Homepage Has One Job, Is It Doing It?

Your homepage is the most important part of your website – it provides the first impression of your business to new potential customers.

It’s one job is to turn visitors into leads. Leads are individual to every business but could include clicks through to service pages, a purchase, a newsletter sign up or contacting the business.

Therefore, your homepage is the complete guide to the rest of your website and these conversion points.

Do you know how important your homepage is? Here’s why it’s so vital, what’s needed to succeed and common mistakes to avoid alongside tools to help you test the effectiveness of your homepage.

What Visitors Decide in the First Five Seconds

The first thing a person does when they go on a homepage is evaluate what you do, whether you are relevant to solving their problem and what they should do next, also known as the call to action.

This information needs to be clearly signposted as visitors tend to scan pages in order to decide if your business appeals to them.

Users are also looking at the quality of your website design, including your business logo, ease of navigation and the overall aesthetics of the page. Design quality can build trust before a user even reads any text.

The Key Elements Every Homepage Needs

Your homepage needs to consist of a few elements to help guide users through your website and encourage further engagement.

Starting with the first section a visitor will come across on your homepage: the hero section. This should include:

• A clear headline – Layout your product or service clearly
• Subheading – Explain your value, why customers should pick your product or service
• Call to action – A prompt to encourage an immediate response ‘enquire now’ or ‘buy now’
• Image or video – To visually show the customer your product, service or reflect your business

Each of these elements helps shape the first impression your business makes, so you need to grab your user’s attention to prevent them from leaving straight away.

The middle section of your homepage is where you should include your core content, such as:

• The products or services your business provides which should include summarises and photos
• Customer reviews to encourage trust and allow visitors to see real experiences of what your business delivers
• Your unique value proposition explaining why customers should pick you over other businesses

The final section of your homepage is known as the wrap up and footer. The wrap up is the final chance to encourage visitors to achieve your goal, whether this is to purchase, get in touch or sign up.

The footer needs to include quick links for easy access to social media, privacy policies, contact information and sitemaps.

Common Homepage Mistakes

Whilst your homepage may include all the elements needed to do its job, there may be some common mistakes that prevent traffic from becoming leads.

Unclear Messaging

If your hero section doesn’t answer who you are, what you do and who it is for is one of them. These are answers customers should be able to determine immediately; customers who must scroll to find out are more likely leave the page quickly.

This also applies to your call to action. Customers don’t want to be searching the homepage for the next step, so having it easily accessible at the top of your homepage encourages further engagement.

Readability

If your homepage includes hard-to-read fonts, customers will struggle to read the information and ultimately disengage. Your text needs to be clear in a large enough size with high contrast to the background.

It’s not just about the font style either. It’s important to break down paragraphs into short, scannable blocks, as customers like to digest information quickly. This is best provided in bite-sized pieces rather than large blocks of text which can lose the customer’s interest.

It doesn’t matter how nice your homepage looks, if people can’t read or find the information they are after, it is unlikely they will be coming to you for business.

Images vs Text

Whilst it is important to visually show your business through images, your homepage needs to strike a balance of images and information.

Homepages that include an excessive number of photos makes it harder for customers to access the information they are after and what to do next. However, excessive text can also drive people away. It is important to find the right balance of images and text for your homepage.

These common homepage mistakes can result in a high bounce rate, people who land on your page and leave without clicking anything. This can lead to less sales, lower engagement and missed opportunities to expand your business.

How To Test If Yours Is Working

If you are unsure how well your homepage is working for you, then there are a few ways you can test this.

The 3 Second Test

One of the easiest ways to see if your homepage is doing its job is to question whether someone could answer these questions:

• What do you do?
• Is this relevant to me?
• What should I do next?

If these questions can’t be answered after three seconds of looking at your homepage, you may have an issue.

Tracking Visitor Behaviour

An alternative way to see if your homepage is working is to track visitor behaviour which can be done in many ways.

Bounce Rate

Measuring your bounce rate allows you to understand how many visitors quickly leave your page, for example, if your bounce rate is around 70%, this suggests there could be a problem. Whether customers don’t understand what you offer or what to do next, customers aren’t engaging.

Average Session Duration

Analysing the average session duration on your homepage provides insight into how long people are spending on the homepage before either clicking through or leaving.

A good rule of thumb is if the average is less than 30 seconds, people are typically scanning the information and leaving. If the average is over 2 minutes, people are engaging but maybe not finding the information quickly enough.

The sweet spot for an average session duration ranges between 45 to 90 seconds.

Conversion Rate

Understanding your conversion rate can show how many visitors complete your desired action. This tracking method may not show you straight away if your homepage is working for you, but is a good tool to compare over time.

If you frequently make changes to your homepage, accessing data to show how it impacts your conversion rate can provide you with results to help you make more informed decisions regarding your homepage. 

If you are unsure on the effectiveness of your homepage or are looking for advice on how to improve your website Logic Design are here to help individual client’s needs. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you. Visit our contact page, give us a call on 01473 934050 or email us at [email protected].

Written by Holly Weller Marketing Assistant

Holly Weller is one of our Marketing Assistants currently studying BA Business Management focused in marketing alongside her work. She is interested in exploring different marketing channels and furthering her knowledge in the industry. When she’s not working or studying, she’s playing padel with her partner or on the netball court.

All Articles by Holly Weller