Optimize Your Website Homepage for Visitors
Optimize your homepage for human visitors (aka customers)
Your website homepage must satisfy two important types of visitors - humans and web-crawlers. Getting your web site content and structure organized and presented in a way that ensures both types of visitors get the right information, reliably, easily and presented in the most effective manner is equivalent to table stakes
for a successful website.
This blog post walks through practical considerations for optimizing your homepage for the human type visitors. Considerations for web-crawlers are covered in a separate post.
Psychological considerations for an effective home page design
There is an interesting Psychology Today post titled The Science of First Impressions that has notable relevance for the design of websites. Although the article was about the science of human-human interactions, it is not unreasonable nor difficult to extrapolate the findings and apply the conclusions to website first impressions.
Two instructive conclusions from the article are:
"..meeting people activates the same region of the brain responsible for assigning prices to objects. And after we’ve assigned a value to a person, we make the decision about how to orient ourselves to that person: do we want to get closer? Knowing what this person’s value is to us, do we want this person to be involved in our network?"
and
"..one of the best ways to take advantage of a first impression is to give people a reason to trust and value you."
In other words, our brains are wired to begin leading us along the buyer's decision journey of "Know", "Like", "Trust" within the first few seconds of meeting someone, or in the case of websites, within the first few seconds of visiting. Furthermore, one of the most effective ways of applying that understanding is to give your new visitors a reason to value, i.e. know and like, and trust your website.
Functional considerations for an effective home page design
In addition to psychological factors, there are also functional questions to consider when creating your website homepage. If you imagine your home page as the digital entrance and online reception area for your business, the functional factors to consider become easier to identify. For example, in a physical business you would ensure your reception area -
- is visually appealing and gives a good overall impression
- helps visitors feel welcome and know they are at the right business
- helps visitors understand what your business is about
- helps visitors understand whether you offer the types of products or services that address their needs
- invites visitors to explore products or services and guides them to the areas of interest
- makes it easy and fast to ask questions, get answers and transact if desired
These same principles can be directly translated to the content and structure of your home page.
Bounce rate as measure of home page effectiveness
One useful metric that gives an indication of well your home page is meeting the needs of your visitors, is your home page bounce rate. According to Google:
"Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server."
In other words, bounce rate is the percent of visitors that navigate to your home page but don't go any further into your website. Therefore, unless your website is a single page site such as a blog, having a high bounce rate is considered a bad thing. In our reception area analogy, bounced visitors are those folks that step in the door, glance around and then leave without speaking to any of your staff or exploring any of your products.
Make sure your online reception area is ready for business
By addressing both the psychological and functional considerations you can be more confident that your online reception is open and ready to welcome your visitors.
Get a free, no-obligation homepage checkup
If you are uncertain whether you have all of the considerations covered, why not get a free, no-obligation evaluation of your website for factors addressing the needs of both human and web-crawler visitors. Again, it's free and there is no-obligation.
Watch an example of a homepage makeover.
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