Is your homepage actually that important?

A lot of website owners see their homepage as a stand-in for their whole website. And it’s understandable, it may be the single most important page. If you are a small business with a one-page website then it is your whole website. That said, for most websites it’s not actually as important as they think.

The danger of over-valuing your homepage is that it will waste your time: when you improve or refresh your website you will spend a lot of time on the homepage and perhaps not on the pages that need it.

The 3 things you should find out first are:

1. What percentage of your website visitors even visit your homepage at any point?
2. What percentage of your converting visitors visit your homepage at any point?
3. How do the 2 metrics compare? If the 2nd percentage is higher, this means your homepage correlates positively with conversion, those who converted are more likely to have visited it than your average visitor. If on the other hand the 1st percentage is higher, this means your homepage correlates negatively with conversion. It doesn’t necessarily mean that your homepage is turning people off converting but it’s a possibility for you to investigate.

When we looked at these metrics for our clients, most clients got under 20% for the first metric and about 20-30% for the second metrics, meaning that visitors were doing just fine taking action without seeing the homepage. The more deep pages you have the lower these metrics will be.

Does your homepage get most people to where they need to be in one click?

A homepage can have several objectives, some of which are more qualitative, such as explaining what your website does well and portraying your organisation or brand in the right way. However for most homepages, you probably have different pages you want to funnel the users to. Whether you can do this in one click can be the sign of a good homepage. Now for some websites this might not be possible (for example in ecommerce you may need to surface a bunch of popular categories straight away) but this is something you want to strive for. For others this is very easy, for example the classic blank page with a search box. If you can get away with that, great.

Are you addressing multiple audiences?

If your website speaks to multiple audiences the homepage is a great place to address this. It can be a simple as a set of links or tiles that say something like “I am a teacher” vs “I am a student”.

Your most loyal visitors are more likely to go to the homepage since they might have your website bookmarked or just type it into the browser’s URL bar. If they’re repeat visitors they are probably coming to do a specific task. If you can surface that for them straight away, you will eliminate clutter and increase conversion.