The humble homepage. Every website owner has one and we see them every day of our online lives, but have you ever wondered what the actual purpose of a homepage is?
As always, we Monsters are dedicated to helping you understand how to get the best out of your website, so we’ve created this post to enlighten you on the importance of your homepage and given you a few tips of the trade for making it more effective.
Everyone has a purpose in life
For the homepage, its main reason for living is to quickly and easily direct your web viewers to the place on your website that they need – while making a great first impression. Because that’s what we’re all doing when we’re online, right? Looking for answers to our questions.
Whether your question is ‘who is a good landscaper to use?’ or ‘how to cook your chicken for dinner’. Connecting with your viewers problem is a proven way to get their attention and keep them on your site.
When your potential customers are searching for answers to their questions Google works to connect consumers with websites that are most likely to solve their problem and in most cases, it will land them on the homepage of the website.
Getting viewers onto your homepage is a great success
Never underestimate how great it is to have web users find your homepage! It means you’re doing one or more of the following things:
- You’ve won their presence by showing up high on page one of Google
- You’ve paid for their appearance from a pay per click as such as Google Ads
- You’ve spent hours posting on social media to grab attention
So, once you’ve landed potential customers, you want to treat them like royalty and not let them go. In other words, you want to keep people on your homepage and entice them to click through to other pages on your website.
Making a great first impression
This is probably the most obvious role of the homepage. It’s the equivalent of paying careful attention to what you wear to work, or the appearance of the storefront of your premises.
The way your homepage looks and most importantly, the experience it gives your viewers goes a long way to keeping them on your website and becoming a paying customer. Great design is made up of a number of elements: getting the logo in the right place, easy contact details, stating your offerings nice and early, precise wording, colours, fonts, professional images or video (have we mentioned the importance of using video on your website?) – all wrapped up in a logical order.
Top tips to make your homepage work
Make it easy for consumers to find answers to their problems.
Whatever business you run, you need to be absolutely clear why your customers come to you, that is, what problems do they have and how can you solve them? Web viewers will get quickly frustrated and click away from your website unless you provide clear links to the relevant product or service.
Provide small, bite size snippets of content that’s easy to scan quickly. This lets them find the product of service of yours that they need without having to do much hunting around. Add lots of calls to actions to lead them onto other pages that will give them more information.
The call to action or CTA is a small imperative statement consumers can click on to get in touch with you quickly. Examples of CTA’s are:
- Buy a product
- Get a quote
- Get in touch today
- Call now
- Make an enquiry
- Learn more
- Lets get started
Whatever it is, make it easy!
Computer vs mobile device
Another important thing to consider when constructing your homepage is how your audience will be viewing it – on a computer screen or a smaller, mobile device?
For those of you running B2C businesses, your web viewers are most likely to experience your homepage on smaller mobile screens, so it’s important you take this into consideration. Remember, flashy and impressive doesn’t translate well to a mobile screen!
If you understand the basic purpose of a homepage and follow these few guidelines, you’ll ensure your potential customers have a great experience when they land on your homepage.
Need some more advice on how to make your homepage earn its keep?
Our experts are always happy to help! Get in touch today and let’s see how we can take your homepage to the next level.
