Your website homepage is like a shop window. It should entice people to look around your store and give them an idea of what you provide and like shop windows, it should be regularly updated to reflect the seasonal offerings. For instance, the winter months prove the most popular for users when it comes to booking their holidays for the upcoming year as flights and accommodation can be up to 35% cheaper.
It’s easier to say than to do well, so here are a few ways to improve your website homepage to meet today’s web design standards.
1. Keep your content updated
There is nothing worse than an out of date website homepage. I recently visited the website of a local café, to find out they were still promoting summer events in September! Schedule a monthly reminder to check your website and keep the homepage update to date.
2. Have a prominent call to action
When a visitor arrives on your homepage the next action should be clear and obvious. You want them to react to your Call to Action (CTA). A CTA is usually designed in the form of a large button and clicking on it will take users through to your key product or service, or lead form. The best position for a call to action is above the ‘fold’ – this is the top part of your homepage that’s visible without scrolling. In a recent case study, an online store increased their conversion rate by 11% just by moving the CTA above the fold.
3. Make sure your easily contactable
Take a moment to review your homepage from a visitor’s point of view. Are you making it easy for them to contact you? It’s good practice to add contact information in the header or footer of every page. The minimum amount of information to include is an email address sand phone number. If you receive customers at your business, add your address.
4. Embed videos and images
Adding a video to your homepage can greatly increase conversations. The key is keeping it short and to the point, since user engagement can drop off if you video is longer than a minute. As for a video’s content, it could be an explainer, a series of customer testimonials, product demo, an overview of the services and solutions you provide, or even a quick tour of your restaurant or store.
Images can be used to break up big blocks of text on your homepage – and they are more inviting to visitors. It’s important to include at least one photograph of your business, team or products. It’s worth hiring a professional photographer as high quality photos will demonstrate your business’ professionalism.
5. Improve page speed
If your home page loads slowly, many visitors will give up and never go beyond it. Slow pages can even negatively affect rankings in search engines. The most common cause of slowly loading pages are the inclusion of high-resolution images with large file sizes. No single image should exceed 1 megabyte.
6. Make it mobile responsive
Last year the popularity of mobile browsing overtook desktop browsing for the first time. If your website isn’t viewable on mobile devices it’s likely you will be neglecting a large proportion of your audience. It’s also worth noting that a website that is not optimised for mobile devices can be negatively downgraded in search engine results. If you give your site a facelift, make sure the new design is ‘responsive’, meaning it is responsive to adjust to devices of all sizes.
If you need help improving the website homepage for your business our digital design team would be more than happy to help. To talk to us please call on 01803 295 959.