Author: Neil Patel / Source: Quick Sprout You never get a second chance to make a first impression. I think this is a fitting quote to d
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
I think this is a fitting quote to demonstrate the importance of a great homepage.
Once a visitor lands on your homepage, you need to impress them in a hurry.
Failure to do this typically results in a lost conversion with the vast majority of visitors never returning.
How can you ensure you make a good first impression?
And, more importantly, how do you boost conversions and increase the revenue value of your homepage?
There are countless strategies that work to some extent.
But I’d like to cover a handful I feel are the most practical and impactful.
I’ve researched each of these strategies and have implemented them on my own as well as my clients’ sites.
I’ve even seen some clients increase the revenue value of their homepages by as much as 851%.
This is not an exaggeration or some gimmicky hype to get you to click on my articles. This is stuff that works.
Let’s get down to business.
Make the load time lightning fast
Your first objective is to ensure a fast load time.
This is perhaps the most important factor of all because the rest of the strategies I’m going to discuss don’t really matter if the bulk of your visitors abandon your homepage prematurely.
Here’s a graph that illustrates how page abandonment increases as the load time of your homepage increases:
I suggest using the Pingdom Website Speed Test to accurately assess the load time of your homepage.
If it takes any longer than 5 seconds, you need to speed it up. Learn how to do it from this article I wrote.
Provide a clear value proposition
Once a visitor lands on your homepage, they should be able to tell right away what you’re offering and why it’s worth their time to check out your site in further detail.
This requires you to take one simple but incredibly important step: create a clear value proposition.
ConversionXL defines a value proposition as a clear statement that:
- explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation (relevancy),
- delivers specific benefits (quantified value),
- tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition (unique differentiation).
Here’s the value proposition I include on neilpatel.com:
Below are some other good examples.
Dollar Shave Club pulls it off well:
So does Unbounce:
You get the idea.
For a more thorough explanation and tips on how to create a killer value proposition, check out this guide from ConversionXL.
Include a picture of a person
A few years back, there was a study that examined the impact of including a picture of a person on homepage performance.
The study involved A/B testing of two very different landing pages created for Highrise, a CRM software company.
The original design was pretty basic but fairly busy, meaning there was a lot of information.
However, the new design was very simple and included a large picture of a woman smiling.
The results were undeniable. Using the second design, with the woman smiling, resulted in 102.5% more sign-ups.
Here’s a comparison of the two designs:
What does this tell us?
It’s clear that including images of people (more specifically, people smiling) on your homepage can have a dramatic impact on conversions.
I actually follow this formula on my homepage for neilpatel.com, and it’s worked out wonderfully:
Do you recognize this guy?
Here’s another one:
And here’s Marie Forleo:
This is Matt Barby:
Here’s Lewis Howes:
These people aren’t celebrities. They aren’t models.
They’re just bloggers. Successful ones.
They’ve figured out that a face on the screen vastly improves the profitability of the homepage.
Make your contact information easy to find
At first thought, placing your contact information in a conspicuous place on your homepage might not seem like a big deal.
It might seem like a mere footnote.
But it’s actually more important than you might think.
In fact, a study from KoMarketing found that
once on a company’s homepage, 64% of visitors want to see the company’s contact information.
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