9 Mistakes You Might Be Making on Your Homepage

It’s likely that the page on your site with the most visits is the homepage – so it’s pretty important that you make sure that it presents an accurate representation of your business.

If you find that most people get to your homepage and don’t get much further, you could be committing one of these website crimes.

You make it difficult for people to get in touch with you

Don’t just make a contact page and think that’s enough. You must have at least your phone number on your homepage, in a visible place such as the header or footer – the aim is to get people to get in contact with you, so why would you make it hard for them?

It isn’t a good base to navigate around your site

A common thing that people do when looking around your site is to click back to the homepage to get somewhere else – like returning to base. This means that you have to allow people to get to all your other pages from your homepage.

Make sure your menu is in a super obvious place and is organised in a simple way that makes it easy for people to explore or find what they are looking for. You should also include a search bar for extra simplicity.

You have a video or sound that auto plays

You know how annoying it is to have 10 tabs open, and not knowing where some music or sound is coming from. Don’t annoy people – if they want to watch your video, they’ll click on it.

Your social icons aren’t easy to find

Many visitors will look to your social media to find out more about your business (and if you don’t have social media, or don’t make use of it, check out this post).

Make it easy for them to do by having obvious links to your social media in your header and footer, and possibly even your sidebar too, if you have one.

It’s too cluttered

In case you didn’t know, we love whitespace. And, although it can be tempting to put everything that you think is important on the homepage so visitors see it straight away, you won’t be doing your business any favours. If there’s too much going on, visitors won’t know where to look.

Instead, pay attention to the ‘less is more’ rule, make sure people know what your business does, include some graphics or colour to grab their attention, and then guide them to where you want them to go next.

What you do isn’t immediately obvious

You may think you’re being clever and unique with your tagline, and you probably are…but a lot of people probably won’t understand it or figure out what you do from it.

Your visitors are not stupid, but the purposes of designing your homepage, it’s sometimes helpful to pretend that they are. You can go into detail and include more information on other pages – your homepage is to make sure that they know for sure (like, for SURE) what it is that you do.

You put too much emphasis on branding

Yes, your logo should be on your homepage and your branding should be consistent. But that doesn’t mean it should be the centre of attention. The message you want to get across should be the most obvious thing – your branding should be subtler.

So, make your logo a bit smaller, and stop focusing all your attention on making sure that it appears twenty other times on the same page. You shouldn’t be trying to distract viewers from what they really need to know. If the message is good, they’ll remember your brand.

It isn’t tailored to your target audience

A big mistake that many web designers make is to design a page based on what they like, not what the target audience likes. Do lots of market research and get to know what your audience would love to be on your website.

Don’t design a very professional, business-like homepage for a company that sells toys, just because you love serif fonts and monochrome imagery – it won’t appeal to the right people.

It looks rubbish on a mobile

Mobiles have officially overtaken desktops this year – more people browse and shop on mobiles than they do on desktops. So, we don’t need to tell you that it is really important to make sure that your website is optimised for mobile devices…

If you think you’re making any of these mistakes, why not get in touch with us? We can help you to transform your website into a virtual salesperson that will appeal to your target audience and push more sales.