What Should Be On Your Website’s Homepage?

When having a new website it can be hard to decide what to have on your homepage. Of course, this can change for different websites, so in this blog post we look at some considerations to make when deciding what you want on your website’s homepage.

How Do They Get To Your Homepage & What Do You Want Them To Do?

The first thing I’d consider is how people are likely to get to your homepage, what some people forget is that it’s unlikely that every person is going to visit the homepage. It’s more likely that they will land on a more specific page if coming from search engines or adverts. What they are likely to come to your homepage for is direct (typing in your domain name), branded search or they’ve searched for your main service or product theme (e.g. if you have an ecommerce store selling books and they search ‘buy books online’ they are likely to land on your homepage).

With that in mind it’s important to consider what you want people to do in these kinds of situations. If it’s direct, are they an existing customer looking to make contact, or you may be their go to website within your niche. It may therefore be important to make sure that it is easy to find your contact details or to direct them to relevant category pages.

You may also want to direct them to more relevant category pages if they’ve come from a generic search too. Using the above example, if they’re searched for an online book store, you might want to try and direct them from the homepage to more specific categories such as Crime Books or Autobiographies.

Prove Your Trustworthy

Another thing you might want to show on your homepage is why you should be trusted. This can be anything from reviews and testimonials to different case studies. This helps people see that other people are using your business and are having a good experience and therefore builds some trust with your potential customers.

Where possible you should be using a third party platform in order to do this. These will build more trust than using ones collected yourself as they’re harder to manipulate and therefore higher ratings with these are harder to achieve.

Call To Action

A strong call to action is also recommended on your homepage. This may depend on what your business does however. This may be more important if you’re a service business rather than an online store. This is particularly useful for businesses who offer a single niche of products (i.e. tradespeople, hairdressers etc.) where the potential customer already has an idea of what they want and just need to book an appointment.

About Your Company

This is another point which may not be relevant to all businesses, but if your business is people and culture led then it can be crucial to have this information on your homepage. For these types of businesses it’s normally the people/culture you’re buying into rather than the product or service and this needs to show on the homepage.

It may also be that you want to include some key selling points on your homepage which will help differentiate your business from competitors.

Remember Your Website Is For Your Customers To Use

A final point to consider is that your website is actually for your customers, not the people within the business. When deciding on whether a feature on your homepage you should question whether it’s useful for the customer or if it’s needed to hit business goals. If it’s not going to do either then it may be worth cutting it from your homepage. This can help you have a much clearer messaging on your homepage and help people to take the desired action.