Your home page is making an impression. That impression either will drive more customers to your products and services or send them away faster than a hot knife through butter.

It takes 1/10^th of a second for us to figure out if we’re physically attracted to another person, and an even shorter time (around 50 milliseconds) to decide if we are going to linger on a website page or click away.

Sites with visual appeal, easy access to pertinent information, and quick loading times get 50 percent more clicks than pages that don’t. And guess where most traffic lands when it comes to your site.

It’s your home page.

This is one of our key ingredients for great design at Second Crew.

Landing Page vs. Home Page

It used to be that a landing page and a home page were meant for two different purposes.

• A home page was meant to inspire visitors to go to another page, seeking either a product or more information.
• A landing page was meant to satisfy their need for said product or service.

The landing page was considered the place to make a sale, engage more fully with a potential customer, or capture information for future engagement.

A home page was thought of as the welcome mat to your business before you ring the bell.

That was the Internet in 2017.

Now, the trend is to make your home page a landing page. There are some very good reasons to support this trend.

1. More than 50% of your entire site’s traffic is going to your home page.
2. If you can’t convince someone you have the product or service they need on the first page they land on, you likely never will.
3. Using heat map analysis, users are more likely to click to other pages if they first engage on your homepage, and usually, it is via a video, infographic, image or a specific call to action.
4. Your homepage summarizes everything you do if done right – and a potential customer visiting it will know instantly if they are in the right place or need to click to another site.

Landing pages also contribute greatly to your conversion rate optimization, which means you will be landing and converting customers even while you sleep. So why not make the very first page, your home page, the one where customers are begging for more?

Here’s an example of a homepage/landing page done right. VividBoard has not one call to action but several. You can also instantly see an overview of what the company offers. There is a lot of information available about their product types, but it isn’t busy or confusing. You can see – front and center – that they sell whiteboards. For a corporate manager looking for this product their site is easy on the eyes and expresses exactly what they are offering the market.

How many sites do you land on that have a snazzy looking home page (or a dull, lifeless one) but it fails to encapsulate what they offer. Or worse, they don’t tell customers what to do with a call to action?

This is where quality website design comes into play. Details like these can cause your conversion rates to plummet, and business to dry up. We know this all too well at Second Screw, and we’ve helped countless clients fix this problem.

Of course, you’ll want to make product pages and additional content pages amazing, too. But if you have the budget and time to do nothing else, you need to turn your homepage into an EPIC landing page.

Here are a few tips to apply to your home-page/landing page to make them highly optimized for customer conversion:

1. Get rid of clutter. One of the fastest ways to make people click away is if their eyes and brain get confused and disoriented gazing at your home page. Everything should be clean, clear and simple, and above all visually appealing.
2. Give at least one call to action, if not several. You don’t want potential customers to sit an admire your web design (which they won’t ever do). You want them to take action. Offer them one, two, three, ten ways to take action NOW. The more compelling you can make this call to action, the better.
3. Make sure your home page loads lightning-fast. You can lose potential customers if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load. Hubspot offers twelve cases where slow load times drastically affected conversion rates.  They found that Up to 79% of customers who are dissatisfied with a website’s performance say they’re less likely to buy from the same site again. Performance includes speed. Take the time to make sure your site is loading as fast as conceivably possible.
4. Optimize your homepage for mobile accessibility. More than 80 percent of the world is using their mobile device to access your site. Make it easy on this audience to find your site, and surf your pages. Google is also updating their algorithms to favor sites that are mobile-friendly. Use this as a competitive advantage for your business.
5. Make sure all photos and video are super crisp, clear, and of the highest quality. These reflect on your quality of business products and services, if only subconsciously. Embed high-quality videos so that your customers don’t have to go off-site to view them.
6. Your sales copy should be concise and convincing. If possible address specific pain points that your product or service alleviates. Talk about your products and services like real people do. Use interesting analogies. And use exacting language to describe a problem and how it is solved using your product or service. If your customers consistently rave about something that you do – put it front and center. Your own customer testimonials are a treasure trove of possible copy for the rest of your site.
7. Communicate with big partners. Have you done work for Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.? Maybe you aren’t a big enough company to have these business partners, but the more business connections you communicate clearly, the more people will trust your site. This leads to higher conversion rates.
8. Humanize your site. Use real pictures of you and your team so that people can trust you further. They don’t want to do business with a robot, they want a relationship with you.
9. Communicate return policies and trust-services clearly on the first page/home page to develop trust. This can be as simple as including Better Business Bureau badges or Trusted Site icons.
10. Make exiting the funnel hard, and staying easy. You can do this by offering options. Using the VividBoard example, they give you many options for the types of whiteboards you might need.

As always, you can reach out to us at Second Crew, and we can help develop a highly converting homepage and amazing landing pages for you, too.