5 Tips for Optimising Your Homepage
02/03/2022 | Share:
Making a bad first impression with your homepage can be the difference between acquiring new business or losing an opportunity. With ecommerce stores, your competition is only ever a click away, and this makes it imperative to present your business in its best possible light.
Your homepage is the most critical part of your ecommerce website as it provides the very first impression of your company. In addition to this, it is typically the most visited page and the easiest URL to remember. Your homepage immediately showcases your mission, values, and goals, and as it has numerous types of traffic coming, it must cater to each one.
This is a lot to ask of a single page!
To ensure you have the best homepage you can that has a lasting impression, we have outlined five top tips to help you on your way. Although you can take many more actions, the five below are the most essential to get right.
#1 Think About Mobile Experience
In January 2021, there were roughly 58 million active mobile internet users in the UK. And while the distribution of website traffic will vary, a considerable amount of visitors will be using mobile internet; and viewing your homepage on the small screen of a phone.
Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer optional.
If you ignore the importance of mobile visitors having a good experience with your homepage, then you’ll ultimately be driving a considerable percentage of them away. This will damage your search engine rankings in the process and take away the opportunity of consumer action – subscriptions, enquiries, engagement, sales.
There are many ways you can improve a mobile experience, such as:
- Making your site responsive: Recommended by Google, responsive web design focuses on how user-friendly a site is for mobile and desktop users; how a page is arranged and displayed changes based on the user’s device. This design layout will allow all users to see the same amount of information, and it’s good for SEO, too.
- Ensure information is easy to find: Reducing the steps users have to take to find the information they want will improve their mobile experience. Often mobile users want a specific answer, and they want it now. Make sure your vitals are clear and that they don’t take much searching for.
- Avoid pop-ups and text-blocking ads: While no visitor is a huge fan of pop-ups and text-blocking ads, they’re extra irritating for mobile users, and most will click back rather than try to find the tiny X to get rid of the ad. A positive experience will include none of these; however, if you find them essential for marketing, consider where you place them. The bottom of the page is much more desirable than the top, where they’re the first thing a mobile user sees.
- Speed things up: Making your website speed a priority will be greatly appreciated by all users, especially those on mobile devices where people are less likely to wait around. There are many tactics to use to increase your site’s speed, such as AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), upgrading your hosting plan, and compressing site images.
#2 Provide Contact Info
Although many websites have a specific page for ‘contact us,’ it is advisable to include contact information on your homepage as well. This limits the actions a user has to take to contact you and makes you appear more authoritative and professional.
Contact information is hugely important to potential, current, and previous consumers, and the easier it is for them to find, the better. In addition, the more contact information you provide then, the better established you appear. A website with a simple mobile number listed as a primary contact detail doesn’t portray the same level of trust as a site with multiple avenues.
The type of contact information you include will depend on the longevity, size, and type of your business, but generally, consumers want to see:
- A registered business name
- A registered business address
- One main landline number, at a minimum
- Out of hours phone number
- Email address(es)
- Social media links
#3 Feature Your Best Products
Not every visitor will go in search of all the products you stock, and often there is a clear route taken to a specific product page which means most of your items remain unseen by the majority of guests. This isn’t the case if the best products you have are featured on your homepage, where every visitor lands.
In addition to featuring your best product, you should also feature its benefits in a concise and straightforward way. It can be challenging to find the line between using this space as an advertisement and simply giving readers a glimpse of what is available. But, if you get it right, it can be very profitable indeed.
#4 Add Some Sales
The keyword to take here is some. Your homepage is not a selling page, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot make sales from it. As well as featuring your best product, you could also list some flash sales, seasonal discounts, or offers that are currently available.
Wrap this up with some catchy headings, and you have yourself a homepage that also works as a valuable advertising platform. Remember the mobile users and ensure that there aren’t too many images or too much text, and you should have an optimised homepage for sales.
#5 Include Effective Calls to Action
Call to actions are key elements on most web pages but crucial for a homepage – when done correctly. Without a clear CTA, users can be unclear about what is necessary to do, which could result in them leaving the site without accomplishing their goals.
How you create your call to action will depend on the type of business and content you have.
For example, on a blog post, a CTA may be “read more here,” “share this post,” or “sign-up to our newsletter.” For a B2B company, CTAs could be “free trial,” “sign up,” or “get started.” Whereas on an ecommerce homepage, CTAs will commonly be more sales directed such as “buy now,” “add to cart,” or “quick buy.”
Summary
The homepage of your website is your visitor’s first introduction to your business. Way before they make the decision whether or not to become a consumer, they will be reviewing your homepage to get a feel for your business, see your products, values, and the benefits your business can bring to them. All of these things can be added naturally to your homepage.
Ensure that you always consider the mobile user and how you feel when viewing competitors’ sites, too. Incorporate the elements outlined above, and you have a perfectly optimised homepage.
