Why Your Homepage May Matter Less Than You Think

Think of the last time you worked on a website redesign.

Excitement was in the air. Brains were storming and being picked. And there was a lot of talk about what should be included on the homepage.

But was it too much talk? 

When it comes to web design, there is a tendency to spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing what elements will go on the homepage, relegating crucial interior pages to the category of “afterthought.”

At some time or another, we’re all guilty of this sin, this author included.

Focus is spent on what is commonly perceived to be the highest-visibility URL on our entire site: the homepage. Erroneously we assume that because it is the root domain of our site that it is the page seen by all site visitors.

Let’s shatter that myth right now: Not every visitor will view your homepage.

Many of them will come in through one of the many back doors of content discovery: search engines, social media, email newsletters, links from other sites, and links in IM conversations to name a few.

It’s not the first page visitors see each time they visit the site. In fact, they may rarely visit your homepage if at all.

The chart below lists the percentage of page views occurring on the homepage for 20 websites, which range from magazine sites to e-commerce sites to humor blogs (and a lot of places in between).

They were collected from my own personal experience and from kind webmasters willing to share their numbers.

What do all of these percentages have in common? None of them are above 40% and most of the percentages are in the teens.

Clearly, this is not a statistically significant study, but it does provide the backdrop for an interesting question: does the percentage of time spent deliberating over the homepage align with the percentage of our visitors who actually visit the homepage?

Of course the two numbers will never be perfectly in sync, and we still may be able to justify spending a large chunk of time on our homepage design for aesthetic and marketing reasons (see below), but it should give us pause.

It should cause us to ask: are we dedicating enough time to other pages that will really do the work for us?

Pages like:

• Category/archive templates

• Conversion/call-to-action pages

• Individual article templates

• Other pages with a high percentage of visits

None of these pages may individually outrank your homepage in terms of percentage of pageviews, but as an aggregate, they really add up.

Spending time designing high-quality templates that apply to many pages throughout your site may be a better spend of time than fussing over the homepage.

What I’m not saying about homepage design
Please understand that I’m not saying your homepage design doesn’t matter. It’s your company’s face. It’s the URL you give to someone when you say “check us out.” It’s the link you submit to directories, it’s the screenshot you put in your PowerPoint slides, and it’s the link you send to potential clients. It is the “cover” you feel your “book” is being judged on.

The concept may be counterintuitive, but the numbers don’t lie. Debunking the myth of the homepage in your organization can help to make the shift from aesthetics to performance.

It’s not about how you see yourself, it’s about how others see you. And many aren’t looking your homepage in the eye.

Useful further reading on the importance of your homepage in web design:

• Prioritizing Design Time: A Long Tail Approach

• Usability Tools Podcast: Home Page Design

• The decline of the homepage

• Homepage design and purpose – McGovern vs webstats

• Myth #17: The homepage is your most important page

Do homepages matter more than I think?

[image: wordridden]

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• Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage (seomoz.org)