The homepage is arguably the most important of all the pages within a website that web designers create.

Given that most visitors to a business website land on the homepage first, this page has the job of instantly connecting and engaging with visitors. If it does so, it will keep those visitors on the site, hopefully with them then taking the desired action. If not, they will click away almost immediately and likely never return.

With this in mind, website owners must ensure that when their business website is being designed, they know what elements should be included on the homepage to maximise visitor engagement. To help them, we have selected some of the most effective ways of doing so in the seven tips outlined below.

1. Make It Obvious What Your Website Is About

Before they land on your website, visitors will have clicked on a link on another website, such as social media, an online business directory, or even a paid ad. When they do so, they will have an expectation of your website, so the homepage must immediately make it clear what your website is about.

Your homepage plays three important roles:

• It introduces new visitors to your brand and gives them an idea of what your products or services are.
• It creates a first impression of your website that can either entice visitors to stay and explore or click away, losing opportunity.
• It guides visitors to the main sections of your website, encouraging them to browse.

Use images and videos to catch your visitors’ attention. For example, a homepage for a fitness website should feature active, energy-filled visuals. On the other hand, sleek and elegant imagery suits jewellery homepages. You can either go for small, relevant images or big images layered with text.

Also, since the majority of the content on most homepages is likely to be text, and as it is often the first thing visitors see when they arrive, it must be easily readable. Complex and artistic fonts, which look like they have been written in hand using a fountain pen, will most certainly not be engaging.

Don’t overwhelm them with blocks of text. Break it up and highlight key points to make the information easier to digest. Make sure you have enough whitespace. You can split them into columns or use headings and bullet points to make your content easy to scan.

2. Ensure The Content Resonates With Your Target Audience

Every business with a website should know its target audience, but more than that, it should have a website design that will appeal to and resonate with the audience. That is especially so for the homepage, where the text, images, and other content and features must be congruent with the business’s audience.

Here are some tips on how you can create a homepage that resonates with your target audience:

• Identify your target audience. Do research and get to know your target audience. What are their pain points? What are their interests and goals?
• Use a tone and style that aligns with your audience and your brand. Aside from helping you connect with your visitors, this establishes your brand identity, differentiates you from competitors, and helps you maintain a consistent voice across all your channels. For example, Disney’s brand voice is focused on magic and nostalgia while Google is informative, friendly, and helpful.
• Highlight what value you have to offer. Use a strong headline and a compelling tagline to inform your visitors why you matter to them. You can demonstrate how you can solve their pain points with your services or products as well.

3. Make Sure Your Homepage Loads Fast

While this is one of the most discussed principles of web design, it is astonishing that some websites are still slow to load. One of the things to do to make sure that your homepage catches the eye of your website visitors right away is to load as fast as possible. Your homepage’s loading speed can bring down your rankings and make visitors frustrated enough to click away if it loads slowly.

You can use Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) to find out how your homepage scores on three metrics.

• Large Contentful Paint (LCP) – How quickly does the primary content of your homepage load?
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – When someone clicks, scrolls, or types, how fast does your homepage react?
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – How stable is your homepage layout as it loads?

Here are a few tips to get a good score in CWV and improve the loading speed of your homepage:

• Use image editing tools to resize images and lower image file sizes without losing quality.
• Consider using WebP format for your images. It’s a modern format created by Google to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This speeds up your website’s loading speed by storing your website’s data in centres all over the world, enabling visitors to quickly download these files from the CDN that’s nearest to their location.
• Minify codes to reduce CSS and Javascript file sizes.
• Remove unnecessary codes that load before the important content on your homepage.
• Limit the plugins that you have and make sure to only go for those that are necessary, fast, and well-coded.

4. Give Visitors A Clear Pathway

A homepage should not be forcing visitors to second-guess what steps they should take to explore and consume the content within the website. For this reason, your homepage must include clear signals as to how visitors should proceed using calls to action, visual guides, and clear navigation.

Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many options. Try to limit your navigation headers to 5 or 6, with 8 being the maximum for headers that go across.

Your header navigation should provide a clear and logical path to your website’s important pages. Keep your navigation labels short and descriptive, so your visitors know where the links lead to. You can use drop-down menus for your header navigation by grouping related pages.

For example, on our website, we’ve grouped all the services we offer under one category. You can use subcategories as well if you have a bigger site to help your visitors find what they need easier.

For the navigation labels, use fonts that are easy to read. Make sure that the font sizes are big enough as well.

5. Choose Your Colour Scheme Carefully

Did you know that colours can have a psychological influence on people? For example, warm colours have a passionate and energising nature. On the other hand, cool colours look more professional and reserved.

Here’s a closer look at what each colour is often associated with and how they are often used to design homepages.

• Red – Passion, excitement, and confidence. Commonly used as an accent colour. A dark shade of red could be used with grey and white to achieve a professional appearance.
• Orange – Energy, health, vitality, and warmth. Ideal for food and beverage websites as it can stimulate the appetite.
• Yellow – Hope, happiness, and cheerfulness. Pale yellows for homepages for children, golds as well as darkish yellow for antique stores.
• Green – Growth, health, wealth, and soothing. Great for finance- and nature-focused sites.
• Blue – Calming, masculine, peaceful, authoritative, and reliable. Light blue for toys and children’s products and dark blue for corporate homepages
• Purple – Magic, mystery, spirituality, and wealth. Dark purples work great for luxury websites.
• White – Cleanliness, purity, healthcare, goodness, and peace. For minimalistic designs or to use as a background.
• Black – Magic, power, elegance, mystery, and formality. Ideal for fashion and finance-related sites and typographic use.
• Grey – Sophisticated, formal, and professional. Can be used as a background or for corporate homepages.
• Brown – Earthy, humble, warm, comfortable, and reliable. Use for typography and backgrounds. Also great for vintage and nature websites.

Whichever emotions you wish to invoke in visitors, the colours on your homepage can assist.

6. Include Call-to-Actions

Call-to-actions (CTAs) are not just for landing pages. You can include them on your homepage too to retain users and gain customers. CTAs on the homepage should be urgent and push visitors into the quick decision-making process.

Your CTAs can encourage visitors to get in touch with you, submit their email, join your newsletter, book an appointment, see the prices of your products and services, or complete an application. If doing social media marketing, you can also add CTAs to entice visitors to visit your social media account and follow.

Emphasize the CTAs on your homepage while making sure that they blend seamlessly with the visuals and theme.

7. Your Homepage Must Display Properly On Mobile

The majority of Internet sessions are made from mobile devices. This has led to the need for websites to be made responsive to function properly with mobile software and adapt to different screen sizes and orientations.

Apart from a responsive design, you can also optimise your homepage with the tips below to deliver a great user experience to your mobile users.

• Simplify navigation with a hamburger menu.
• Make your buttons big enough to tap on a touch screen.
• Reduce the loading time on mobile devices by compressing images and not using too much animation.
• Avoid full-screen pop-ups as they annoy users.