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Your homepage is the gateway to your entire website. It’s your opportunity to make a great first impression and drive your visitors towards a conversion. These 11 factors help you make your homepage a success by optimising it for audience expectations and needs.
When it comes to digital marketing, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of your website’s homepage. This is in many ways the virtual front door to your business. Its design, layout, and content will play a major role in convincing your audience to build a connection with you.
Put simply, your homepage serves three key functions:
In other words, you have to get the homepage right. Its impact will be felt across your entire website. Making that happen requires both an understanding of strategy and an ability to implement a number of best practices.
Each of these best practices requires careful thought. It also requires an understanding that today optimising for mobile is no longer optional. With mobile devices now accounting for half of all online traffic and Google using mobile-first indexing, it’s imperative to ensure a consistent, user-friendly mobile experience.
The 11 components listed below are vital to the success of your homepage, regardless of your audience’s preferred browsing device.
Your homepage is the landing page for much of your audience, but likely not their end goal. From there, your visitors might want to learn more about your company, products, prices, or partnerships. They’ll look to your navigation to accomplish these goals.
Although your navigation is of sitewide importance, it is of course an important part of that first impression. A few improvements can help you maximise its success:
Reduce the number of layers in the navigation to avoid your visitors getting lost down rabbit holes, and to reduce crawl depth.
Your users expect the navigation to be in a similar position to the sites they most commonly browse through. Don’t make them think too much by placing it somewhere they don’t expect it to be. A horizontal bar across the top of the page is usually your safest option.
Every item in the navigation should communicate immediately what your audience can expect when clicking on it.
Finally, think twice about hamburger menus. They’ve become popular for mobile navigation, but don’t always add to the user experience on desktop. That’s because they remove the actual menu items from the screen, and give the user more work to do with an extra click. Instead, consider using a tab-style menu for your mobile users that keeps it simple and easy to navigate.
The old adage that mobile users never scroll horizontally is still somewhat true. But that trend is shifting; your mobile visitors are becoming more familiar with horizontal scrolling if they can clearly see that more content is waiting for them. The right navigation can accommodate that.
A website doesn’t fold like the newspaper, but it borrows one of the print industry’s most important concepts. The “fold” for your homepage is the part of the site you can see without any scrolling required, and it’s the single most important area on the page. It is quite literally your hero content, which can make or break the entire user experience.
It takes less than 3 seconds for your audience to form a first impression of your business based on your website. That’s not nearly enough for them to scroll or start searching for content. Instead what they see at first glance will be what informs them and guides their decision to stay or go elsewhere.
To explain the importance of the fold, Donald Miller developed the GRUNT Test. Within the first few seconds on the page without any scrolling required, your users should be able to answer three core questions:
In other words, they need to realise they’ve come to the right place, can trust your business, and understand what their next steps are to keep engaging. Accomplish that feat and you’ll significantly reduce your bounce rate by getting users to dive deeper into your site and towards your conversion points.
As mentioned in the beginning, your homepage is a core piece of your SEO strategy – and your header structure plays a significant part in that effort. These are the headlines that guide your users through the page, describing core areas. They also send signals to search engines on what content can be found on page and its place in the pages hierarchy
Two types of headers are especially important on your homepage:
Exactly how your headings should align with your overall SEO strategy is beyond the scope of this post, but perhaps something we’ll go into in greater detail in another post.
Generally speaking though, the most important part about your homepage headers is the balance between being descriptive and convincing on the one side, and optimised specifically for SEO and relevant keywords on the other.
Although this is beginning to become less of a tricky balancing act, as Google invests more in natural language search and search intent.
Almost 90% of your homepage visitors are there to learn about your products or services above all else. That makes this page the perfect spot to start introducing exactly what it is your business does, and how that work translates into success for your audience.
To start, your homepage is the perfect spot for your unique selling proposition; the short statement that describes exactly what you are selling and how that is different from what your competition is offering. But don’t stop there. Outline and introduce your key products, services, or solutions in a benefits-oriented way.
In other words, go to lengths to communicate exactly why your products and services are the right choice for the consumers. Leave the gritty details to the individual product or service pages. This is the space for an overview, just enough information to prompt your audience to dig in and learn more.
We’ve already hinted at the fact that for your homepage to be successful, you need to include that crucial next step. Once your visitors have glanced over your content, you have a chance to prompt them to continue their journey and ultimately to become a customer. A call to action is how you point them to the next step in their user journey/your sales funnel.
Great calls to action on your homepage should follow a simple formula.
They should:
Beyond providing a simple value proposition, your homepage is also your chance to build credibility. We know that social proof makes your audience more likely to trust your brand. The more you can feature content from your target audience’s peers, the more successful you’ll be in building that trust.
Social proof can come in a variety of shapes and sizes:
Used correctly, these elements can be powerful tools to back up your own internal claims. Keep in mind though, that they need to remain snippets, potentially linking to more in-depth content elsewhere on the page or site. Mobile users in particular will look to skim your page and get quick takeaways rather than reading walls of text.
One of the most basic concepts in web design is the Z-shaped reading pattern, which denotes the way in which we consume content online. Almost every user follows this pattern, and your homepage absolutely has to follow and accommodate it. Here are a few suggestions.
Place your:
This allows your audience get exactly what they need quickly: information about your brand, easy navigation, contact details if they already want to get in touch, and supporting information with a call to action to prompt next steps.
Information matters, but don’t forget about your homepage as a crucial branding opportunity. This is where much of your audience forms a first impression about your business. Use it to make sure that impression is a good one.
That means consistency in your visuals, making sure that your logo and brand colours shine through clearly on the home page. Beyond that, it also means making sure that you have strong visual assets throughout the page that are both memorable and support your core information.
For many businesses, that means a hero image or graphic showing the company’s core product in use or representing the USP in some other way. Don’t stop there.
Case studies could use videos, symbols or icons could help communicate important information. The more unique and memorable your website is, while still getting core information across, the more successful it will be.
Make no mistake about it, to be successful your homepage has to offer a great user experience (UX). Nothing should be confusing, intimidating, or difficult for your audience as they first find your website and interact with your brand.
We’ve already touched on the importance of a clear navigation above, but that’s just the beginning. For instance, if your site has a lot of products, would your users prefer a search bar, over using your standard navigation to find what they’re looking for?
Everything you do on your homepage in both content and design should be judged by how easy (or difficult) it is for your audience to navigate the site and take away what you need them to. Judging everything under that ‘ease of use’ umbrella plays a core part in improving your user experience.
It’s tempting to go all out on your homepage. Flashy designs, embedded videos, and high-gloss visuals can certainly play a role in impressing your audience. But you have to make sure they don’t compromise the actual website performance.
To be successful, your homepage needs to load quickly on any type of device. A 2018 Google study found that 53% of mobile users will abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Slow loading times can also hurt your organic search performance. In 2018, Google rolled out an algorithm update to use speed as a ranking factor, which they are set to build on with Core Web Vitals, in 2021.
Don’t let your coding or visuals get in the way of a good load time. Compress your images, remove superfluous code, and leverage caching where needed. In other words, make sure that the performance of your site never plays second fiddle to its visuals.
A final point from the introduction is worth reiterating. Your home page is the virtual front door into your business. Like its counterpart in the physical world, it isn’t an end in its own. Instead it does its job when it guides users deeper into the site, and towards your conversion goals.
Your audience should have a clear path through your homepage, with well signposted onward journeys. The layout needs to guide them forward, while the calls to action should make their next step clear. Colours, visuals, and content should help entice users to want to learn more.
Don’t be afraid to be explicit. Highlight the most relevant next steps, such as more in-depth content or your products and service pages, and tell visitors what they can find there. That way, your homepage can act as a gateway, funnelling your audience into a journey with your business that ultimately leads to conversions.
Your homepage is in many ways the most important page on your entire website. These 11 factors are designed specifically to help you make sure that you can leverage your audience’s attention, and direct them to specific next steps. Driving them further down the funnel and increasing their chances of becoming customers.
Even if you don’t have the resources for a complete website design, you can use these best practices to evolve this virtual front door and improve the success of your overall site.
And of course, you don’t have to do it on your own. If your homepage is struggling to convert or needs a fresh pair of eyes to provide a professional overview, get in touch with us.
We can provide an expert UX review, where we can help identify what improvements can be made and how to go about implementing them. Let’s work together to make sure your homepage is as good as it can possibly be to help your business succeed online.
