What to put on your homepage, and what to leave off
What to put on a homepage, in the order it should appear, plus the six things to leave off. A section by section plan for a small business site.
What to put on a homepage, in one sentence: what you do, where you do it, why anyone should believe you, and one obvious thing to press. In that order, with the proof higher up than feels comfortable. Most small business homepages get this wrong by burying the useful part under a photograph of a handshake and the words "Welcome to our website".
Assume a stranger arrives from a Google search, on a phone, with a specific problem, and gives you about three seconds before deciding whether to go back. Everything on the first screen has to serve that moment. The rest of the page exists to answer the objections of the people who stayed, in the order they think of them.
What to put on a homepage, section by section#
| Order | Section | What it has to do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Headline and button | What you do, where, one action |
| 2 | Proof strip | Reviews, years in business, accreditations |
| 3 | Services | Three to six, each linking to its own page |
| 4 | Recent work | Six real photographs, yours not stock |
| 5 | How it works | Three steps from inquiry to finished |
| 6 | Prices or price ranges | Remove the biggest unspoken worry |
| 7 | Two or three reviews in full | Named, local, specific |
| 8 | Contact block | Form, email, area covered, hours |
You can move six above five, and a store will want an offers section somewhere. The order otherwise holds up across almost every trade we build for.
The first screen: three things and nothing else#
Write the headline as a plain statement with a place in it. "Emergency electrician in Chesterfield, out within two hours" does more work than any amount of clever wording. If a stranger can’t repeat what you do after reading one line, rewrite the line.
Under it, one sentence of detail. Then one button. Not three buttons. The second button always halves the first one, and the third one is a decision your visitor didn’t want to make. If you have two audiences, give the second a quiet text link rather than a matching button.
Behind those three things, one photograph, and it should be of your work or of you. A background image of an unrelated kitchen from a stock library is worse than plain color, because it makes an experienced visitor suspect everything else on the page is borrowed too. If the only picture you have is a phone snap of the van outside a job, use that. It’s real, and real is the one thing a competitor can’t buy.
Proof belongs higher than you think#
Most sites put testimonials at the bottom, where they are read by nobody. The person deciding whether to trust you is deciding in the first ten seconds, so give them something in the first ten seconds. A thin strip under the headline is enough: a star rating and review count, years in business, a trade body logo, "insured to $2 million", the towns you cover.
Keep it true and keep it specific. "Trusted by hundreds" means nothing. "4.9 from 63 Google reviews" means something, because it’s checkable, and checkable is what proof is. If you haven’t got the reviews yet, the fastest route is in asking a customer for a review without it being awkward.
What to leave off a homepage#
- The slider. Nobody waits for slide two.
- "Welcome to our website." The most wasted line in small business web design.
- A stock photograph of people in a meeting. It tells a visitor you had nothing real to show.
- Your full company history. That’s the about page, and there’s a way to write one people finish, covered in the about page piece.
- A cookie banner covering the button. Legally you may need the banner. You don’t need it to sit on top of the only thing you want pressed.
- Social feeds embedded live. They load slowly and they show a stranger that you last posted in April.
- A newsletter popup after two seconds. Ask later, on the way out, or not at all.
How long a homepage should be#
Long enough to answer the obvious objections, short enough that every section earns its place. Six to eight sections is right for a small business. What kills a homepage is repetition: the same claim about quality and reliability said four times in four different fonts.
If a section is turning into six paragraphs, it wants to be its own page. That’s better for you anyway, because a page about one thing can rank for that thing. The set worth building first is in the five pages every small business website needs.
One test settles most arguments about length. Read the page aloud and stop at every sentence that could be said by any business in your trade. "We pride ourselves on quality workmanship" goes. "Every job gets a written quote before we start, and the price on it is the price you pay" stays, because a competitor who doesn’t work that way can’t copy it. Cut the first kind until only the second kind is left, and the homepage will end up roughly the right length on its own.
A homepage plan you can write in an hour#
- Write your headline. Service, place, and one number if you have one.
- Write one sentence under it. What you do, for whom, and the thing that makes people choose you.
- Choose one button. Usually Get a quote, Book, or Order.
- List three proof items. Review score, years, accreditation.
- Name your services. Three to six, each a phrase someone would search.
- Pick six photographs of your own work. Landscape, well lit, no filters.
- Write the three steps of how it works, one line each.
- Write a price line, even a range. "Most bathrooms come in between $9,000 and $16,000."
- Paste in two reviews in full, with the first name and the town.
- Finish with the contact block: five field form, email address, area, hours.
An Erie cabinetmaker, before and after#
A cabinetmaker had a homepage with a five slide carousel, a welcome paragraph, and his contact details in the footer. Two inquiries in an average month. He was getting the visitors: around 280 a month, mostly from Google.
We rebuilt it to the plan above on March 3. Headline "Custom kitchens and built-in cabinetry in Erie and Crawford County". Proof strip with his 4.9 rating and 41 reviews. Four services, twelve photographs of his own work, prices from $12,000 for a custom kitchen, and a form near the top as well as the bottom.
March gave him nine inquiries from the same amount of traffic. He didn’t spend a penny on advertising, and he didn’t buy a new website either: the domain, the photographs and the hosting bill were all the ones he already had. What changed was that the page finally said what he did, where, and what it cost. If your own site is in the carousel and welcome message era, that’s exactly the work in a redesign.
How to tell whether your homepage is working#
Two checks, neither of which needs an analytics course. First, open your homepage on your phone, on cellular data, and count the seconds until you can read the headline. Over three and you have a speed problem before you have a wording problem. Reading it on a bus is a useful test, and there’s more on that in mobile first, really.
Second, show it to someone who doesn’t know your trade, for five seconds, then take it away and ask what you do and where. If they can tell you, the homepage works. If they say something vague about quality and service, you have written a homepage about yourself instead of one about the customer, and the fix is the ten steps above.
Questions people ask about this
What should be on the first screen of a homepage?
Three things: what you do and where, one line of proof, and one button. On a phone that’s all that fits above the fold anyway. A visitor who can’t answer "is this the right sort of business, near me" in two seconds will go back to the search results.
How long should a homepage be?
Six to eight sections, which is roughly four to six phone screens of scrolling. Shorter than that and you haven’t made your case. Longer and you’re writing a services page by accident, and it should be split into separate pages that can each rank for their own search.
Should my homepage have a slider or carousel?
No. Sliders exist because a committee couldn’t agree which message came first, and almost nobody waits for slide two. Pick your strongest message, make it a still image with text over it, and put the other messages further down the page where they can be read at the visitor’s pace.
Do I need a welcome message on my homepage?
No. "Welcome to our website" tells a visitor nothing they didn’t know and uses the most valuable line on the page to say it. Replace it with what you do, who for and where: "Kitchen remodeling in Erie and Crawford County, from a cabinetmaker with twenty years in the trade."
While you are here
Reading about it is the slow way.
We design the website, write the words and put it online in seven days. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. The same build is openly sold at $1,500, which is what a US agency charges for a small business site of this size. The hosting carries a mailbox, SSL, and the DNS and renewals on your own domain. Domain included on Complete, $18.99 a month. On Basic it’s billed at cost, about $12 a year. No contract and no notice period.