Homepage Basics

eCommerce begins with your homepage. For most webmasters, the homepage is the web page with the highest search engine value, which means that your homepage will receive more visits than any other page in your domain. The homepage is also the most popular entry page for most webmasters.

The most important function that the homepage performs is to take the first step in transforming visitors into finalized sales. The primary focus of your homepage should be communicating legitimacy and professionalism to your prospective buyers. You have less than 3 seconds to convince visitors that you are well established and have a good understanding of the products you sell.
Many companies use their homepage to display a myriad of products (you would think they are trying to cram an image of every product they sell into the homepage). Web designers who lack eCommerce experience seem to believe that visitors leave websites because they do not see the product they are looking for. If you think carefully about the way you shop online, you will realize that visitors are willing to deeply explore websites that they feel are legitimate, but won’t give a second thought to poorly designed or overcrowded websites.  The job of your homepage is not to show your visitors everything that they could possibly be looking for, but to quickly communicate a feeling of professionalism and legitimacy to your visitors.

To evaluate user experience, I recommend keeping a close watch on the bounce rate for your home page (install Google Analytics on your website, and this is easy to monitor). If your page is causing many users to bounce (bounce rate measures how many users leave your website as soon as they hit an entry page), then change the homepage design. When you see a problem, fix it! Don’t sit back and wait for more data. Good websites have bounce rates that are below 50%, decent websites have bounce rates below 70%, and awful websites bounce more than 70% of visitors.

The secondary purpose of your homepage is to ensure that your website is attracting the right type of visitors. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are incredibly good at figuring out what your website is about from the content on your pages. If your website sells women’s clothing, make sure you take care to write content that communicates exactly what you do to your visitors. Not only will this improve user experience on your website, but you will find that the quality of leads you receive from search engines will dramatically improve.

The biggest mistake made by amateur webmasters is to design a homepage for search engines. After years of making this mistake myself, I shifted my focus and began to revamp my websites with the user in mind (hint: pretend that search engines do not exist). Success and high page rankings were quick to follow.