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Jenny Howell April 05, 2019 A 4 minute read

Does your website homepage make an impact on your visitors?

Everyday, we see websites that are not fulfilling their full potential. An impactful home page can make such a huge difference to your business and could be a key tool in helping you grow your customer base and take your company into the future.

Long gone are the days when you just ‘needed to be online’. In fact, it is thought that around 50% of UK businesses still don’t have a website. Now, you are competing with not just your actual competitors but also the complicated algorithms and dynamics of search engines. SEO is hugely important for making your site discoverable, especially if people have not heard of your business before but are looking for a service just like yours.

We could talk about SEO for hours, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you actually get people to your site, there are a number of things that will affect whether that visitor turns into a conversion and actually buys your product or service. A conversion doesn’t have to mean they buy online, but could be a new booking or even a new enquiry – you have got your new potential customer to act and turn them into an actual customer using a call to action.

If your website has a high bounce rate (meaning people do not stay on your site for more than a few seconds) there are a few things that may be affecting this:

  • Your site’s loading speed – any more than 4 seconds and they lose faith in your site
  • The relevance of your site – if your google headers or page descriptions (and other meta-tags) are misleading, non-existent or too general, people may be coming to your site looking for a service that you do not actually provide and will quickly go looking somewhere else
  • Your website home page is not appealing to the visitor

You get about 3 seconds to wow your visitor before they make the decision to look for one of your competitors. So your home page needs to be exciting, impactful and straight to the point.

  • Be clear about what you do – don’t use complicated sales talk above the fold (above the fold is the area you see before you start scrolling) and make sure it says what you are and where you are
  • Use high-quality imagery – your images must be relevant to your business and also not pixelated, though when using a higher resolution image, make sure it is sized correctly so not to slow down your loading speed
  • Use simple navigation – don’t over complicate the menu options or clickable areas on your home page as it only confuses people – your visitors like a site they can browse easily
  • Use a call to action (CTA) to get them to act – most consumers are indecisive and hesitant to commit to investing in a new product or service – give them a reason to invest in yours and ask them to act by clicking on a button, or filling out a contact form, or subscribing to your mailing list, or buying a product. However, keep it simple and try not to go in for the hard sell as this can put people off. A sale, such as on a retail website, is a perfect example of a good call to action
  • Do you have a modern logo? It may sound obvious but your branding could be the key to your success. Outdated branding does not build confidence with your clients so you may want to think about redesigning your logo and using a different colour palette if necessary, to make people more excited about your brand and make it more impactful
  • Check your ‘About’ page – the most highly visited page on a website after the home page is the ‘About’ page, explaining who you are and what you do. People are more likely to buy from a genuine source they can trust, so you should make sure your website is up to date and displays the correct information about you and your company
  • Make sure your site is mobile responsive – if your site does not look good across all devices, it will certainly put people off and they will simply look elsewhere…

Want to check the speed of your website? You can use this helpful tool from Google:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

If you are not already using Google Analytics to measure statistics and traffic to your website, we highly recommend that you get an account and connect to your site asap. Get in touch if you need help with any of the above for your company website.