How to Design a Homepage that Converts

You Want a Converting Homepage, Huh?

It’s a fact: First impressions matter and make a difference.

Go to an interview dressed in a t-shirt, jeans, and sandals? Don’t be surprised if you don’t land the position. Talk only about yourself on a first date? Don’t be surprised if they don’t call you back. Have a lackluster homepage cluttered with text? Don’t be surprised if your bounce rate is abnormally high.

For practically everything in life, first impressions really matter, and that’s applicable even to your website and homepage. When visitors land on your website, the first thing they’ll see is your homepage – and because of this, your homepage really needs to pack a punch if you want visitors to continue browsing through your entire website. If you can’t make visitors stay for the homepage, you’ve got a problem. So, how do you go about creating and designing the mastermind homepage that converts? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back with exactly how.

1. Simplicity is Vital

For your homepage, simplicity is key. Having too much text, images, and overall clutter are way too distracting for visitors. In fact, all the clutter tends to be overlooked more than anything – which you definitely don’t want!

The most effective home pages have clean, minimalistic, and simple designs. Now, that’s not to say that it should be basic (that’s a no-no too), but it shouldn’t be chaotic for the eye. Your homepage should only have what needs to be there. As for all the content and images you have, it’s fine to include it in your website, but don’t pack it all onto your homepage – spread it around on different tabs.

2. Load Time & High-Quality Images

Have you ever been on Google searching for an image and then found one you like? However, when you clicked it, the image takes forever to load and is just a blurry mess, so you just look for a different one? Yup … I think we’ve all been there. Both the poor quality and load time of the image were deterrents for us to stick with it. If people are this impatient for an image, imagine how impatient they would be for a website. Visitors clicking out on your website are going to soar your bounce rate, which is never good.

Also, while it’s great to have images, make sure you don’t overload your homepage (or any page) with them. For one, they’ll slow down your page’s loading time – and we already know how impatient people are today. People are all about that instant gratification and if your website doesn’t deliver, they’re out. Two, having too many images doesn’t actually help your homepage convert. For this, you need a happy balance of having just the right amount of images, like Goldilocks. 😌

3. Make the Call-to-Action Obvious

Let’s be real: The truth is that most people are lazy and if anything takes more effort than they’re willing to expend, then it’s not going to happen. This is the same with the call-to-action on your homepage. Your call-to-action needs to be clearly visible.  If visitors need to search for your call-to-action, then you might want to consider rethinking where it’s placed.

While a call-to-action is great, make sure you don’t overdo it – one is more than sufficient to be effective. In fact, having too many call-to-action buttons actually works the opposite way you want it to and instead, becomes confusing as visitors won’t know which one to click on.

With your call-to-action, you also need to take into account the wording of it. It’s best to have a call-to-action that is clear, action benefit-oriented, and tells you exactly what happens when you click on it.

4. Mobile-Responsiveness

Today, it’s a given that people are always on their phones – it’s definitely more compact and convenient than bringing a laptop everywhere. In fact, people are on their phones more often than they are on their computers or laptops with 52.2% of website traffic coming from mobile phones in 2018. With just over half of the global traffic on mobile, if you don’t have a mobile responsive website, you’ve gotten yourself in a pickle.

Without a mobile-responsive website, you’ve already lost a huge chunk of visitors who don’t have the patience to continue browsing through your homepage, let alone your website.

So, keep all of these points in mind when you’re designing your homepage if you want to see positive results on your business’ conversion numbers.

Interested in designing your homepage with Evilnut? Contact us at service@evilnut.ca or call us at 604.704.6605.