Homepage of a website can include various elements but there are a few of critical elements of a homepage that you absolutely cannot miss. These core ingredients make your website look professional and makes your visitors turn into prospective customers.
So, let’s begin.
Eye catching design
If your website is your home on the internet then its homepage is a window to it. If your homepage looks like a hack job your website visitors would flee faster than The Flash can run a circle round the whole universe. Nobody wants that. So pay special attention to the design of your homepage.
Your visitors should be greeted by a pleasant and eye catching design. Don’t worry if you don’t have supercharged design skills, just surf the web for inspiration. You will find a number of websites like for e.g. pinterest from where you can get a hang of what modern and clean design looks like. Emulate those designs and then adjust as you progress further. You will get better.
Your value proposition
According to various sources on the internet, ”A value proposition tells prospects why they should do business with you rather than your competitors, and makes the benefits of your products or services crystal clear from the outset.
Why should your potential customers do business with you? This question should be answered as soon as they land on your website. Do not bury it so deep that a user has to look for it with a magnifying glass. People don’t have time so make it easier for them to find out your value proposition.
How you can write a great value proposition is a topic in itself. Here is a link to one of the articles that will definitely help.
Call to Action (CTA)
Yes we all have heard this term, CTA. It lets users know what to do. What do you want your website visitor to do? What action you want them to take after they have read about what you do. Do you want them to contact you? Great, place your email id, phone number on your homepage. You can add a contact form as well. Or do you want them to download a pdf in order to add them to your email marketing list. Awesome, add an email form. Remember to highlight these CTAs. The color of the buttons used for CTAs should be brighter and high contrast then the rest of the elements on the page. This helps drive focus to it.
Your homepage is not a novel. In most cases you created it to sell something. So let the users know about it clearly with a big bold CTA.
Short, clear and concise copy
Your website visitor doesn’t have much time on their hands so why do you assume otherwise. Just get to the point about how you can solve their problem. The pain points of the users that you will address with your product or service should be clearly mentioned in a bulleted list. Don’t write essays, just make it concise.
You can do this by writing your first draft and then removing everything until you have only a few lines left. For e.g. If you are a copywriter then you can tell your users that Get your conversion rates up by 5%. Simple and to the point.
Social proof
Humans are social beings. We seek validation for our decisions. We check out reviews on amazon and only then purchase a product. Those reviews tell us that if other people loved this then maybe I would do and this decision that I am making must be correct. That validation would be provided to your website visitor by user reviews, case studies, video testimonials etc. on your website homepage. Do not over do this now also. Use a few of the most important reviews that you can provide. And make sure those reviews are genuine. Respect is a currency which If lost is hard to build. So never lie. Even if you only have 1 or 2 testimonials yet just use them only.
Bonus: Fast loading time
I know the article says top 5 elements of homepage but everyone likes bonuses. So, this is another critical concern for the homepage. No one likes to wait these days. We are accustomed to getting everything on a click and if your website takes forever to load then your user would bounce immediately and look for other options. Make your websites load fast because slow websites frustrates your visitor and leads to bad User experience. This affects the brand in the long term. Some of the ways in which you can make your website load faster are: using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), compressed images, enabling caching, using fewer fonts etc.
These were Top 5 critical elements of a homepage that you cannot miss while designing the homepage of your website.
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