In this digital age, having a perfect homepage is a dream for every small business owner but not achievable for most. Ever wondered why some websites’ homepages are so engaging while others aren’t?
If you are a small business owner who is determined to sell their products and services to beat competition and rise to the top, this post is for you!
Your homepage is the digital storefront for your small business. It can either entice the by-passers and make them customers or be so appalling to even drive the customers away. Looking at what importance a websites’ homepage holds for the small business, I have spent a lot many hours analyzing top-performing small business homepages to find out the best practices one can try on their homepages.
Before we hop into the Do’s and Don’ts of your websites’ homepage, let's first understand why they are so important for your small business?
Benefits of an attractive Homepage
Welcoming and Appealing
When a visitor first comes to your website, they land on your homepage, so basically it’s the first look of your digital store to them. If it feels welcoming, with readable fonts looking nice and the colors describing your brand, it engages the visitor to stay and most likely become a customer. But if it, unfortunately, is the other way round, it increases the bounce rate of your website.
Brand Describing
A user-friendly and descriptive homepage tells your brand story to your visitor at first glance. Why is that important?
The average attention span of your visitor is less than 5 seconds, so you only have a 5-second window to make or break your first impression in the viewers' mind and this, in the longer run, affects your brand!
Encourages Users to have a conversation
While strong SEO brings organic traffic to your website, an interactive homepage encourages your visitors to engage with it and even start a conversation with your brand which gives you an added opportunity to convert them into customers, and this brand-building benefits your small business in the longer run.
So basically, people coming to your website, staying there, understanding your brand, and eventually engaging with it, this is everything a small business owner, that is you, dreams about. It all starts with a perfect homepage!
Now that you know what wonders your homepage can do to your small business, let’s see what your homepage should hold to achieve these wonders…
Key Features of an Engaging Website
There are a lot many features that your homepage can have to make it more engaging and user-friendly, but here I’m going to share those key elements which play the biggest role in visitor retention and engagement.
Web Page navigation allows your visitor to easily navigate from one page to the other.
Here you must know about the “3 click rule”, it says that the visitor on your website must find what they are looking for in 3 clicks or less, if they can’t find what they are looking for during this, they are likely to get irritated and leave your website.
Alongside keeping every element within the 3 click distance, your homepage should have descriptive navigation which not only helps your user but also search engines because let’s be honest, no one is searching for “products” or “services”.
Eye Catching CTA
CTA or Call to Action is something that you want your visitors to do when they land on your website. Here lies your power in driving your visitor where you want them to be and lead to an increase in sales, but how would you do that…?
A study on visitor behavior shows that the first 100 pixels of your homepage are viewed 102% more than the rest of your homepage. Look at the heat map of most-viewed regions of your website below
The red and yellow region here shows the most viewed position of a landing page, so make sure your CTA is somewhere near this location to drive the maximum sales that you can!
Interactive Design
A great web design is about simplicity, you don’t want your visitors to get overwhelmed with too much going on your website. There shouldn’t be lots of confusing colors, multiple messages, and overwhelming visuals.
On a website, White space is the king! It not only looks professional but also creates a very healthy balance between the design and content. White spaces make it easier for your visitor to read the content and understand your services, which further leads to an increase in time spent on the website.
With the help of white spaces, you can also direct more attention towards your CTA to further increase the rate of conversions.
Quality Content
The content on your website works two ways, it not only provides valuable information to your visitor about your brand and services, but also educates the search engines about the same, and you know what that means, ‘Increased Website Traffic’.
Offering compelling content on a clean design is the most effective way to catch the eye of the user, for good. You must take time to develop sharp content and place it at strategic places for fetching maximum interaction leading to fruitful conversions.
There are certain strategies and few things to keep in mind while producing the best quality content for your websites.
Rules of writing content for your website
- Know what your audience is looking for on your website and keep that in prime attention spots
- Use the Inverted Pyramid Model to display the most important content taking the most space and details on your website
- Make your writing clean and crisp for easy understanding of your visitor (and also search engines)
- Divide your website content into sections for better clarity (aid them with creative visuals to increase user interaction).
- I usually have the habit of saving the best for the last, so here goes.
Loading speed
For a fact, the websites that load in 5 seconds or less receive twice as much traffic as websites slower than it.
Keeping customers interested in your website requires the site to not only be interactive, but it must also run very smoothly (not just the homepage but all the landing pages). If this is not the case, it hampers not only user interaction on your website but also affects your search engine optimization.
Design your website’s UX in such a way that all the design loads in an average of 2 seconds and see the wonders it does to your small business.
In The End
Your website is the heart and soul of your small business digitally, if you make sure that it runs effectively, you’ll start seeing the wonders it does to your sales.
The elements I mentioned above are something which I have seen to work for leading small businesses, which is why keeping these things in mind assures to fetch significant results.