According to Nielsen, users spend an average of 10–20 seconds evaluating a homepage before deciding whether to stay. A compelling homepage also provides second-hand benefits, such as increasing organic traffic through an SEO boost. 

However, crafting an engaging homepage requires distilling complex information (like your value proposition) into digestible pieces for different audience segments. The key to success lies in continuously experimenting with and iterating on the key elements of your homepage. In this post, we’ll break down the essential components of an engaging homepage and how to optimize each one to turn visitors into buyers.

What makes a good homepage experience? 

A good homepage design tells visitors it's worth their time to explore your website by providing a comprehensive yet focused view of your business. Think of your homepage as a strategic gateway—not a complete product manual (that’s what product pages are for) or an exhaustive FAQ (leave that for FAQ or support pages). Instead, its goal is building trust with users and confidently guiding them to their next step.

To accomplish this goal, businesses should pay attention to the following principles across their homepage: 

• Attractive, eye-catching visuals
• Clear messaging
• Powerful social proof 
• Effortless user experience
• Bonus: Personalization based on the user 

Let’s break down each of these elements. 

Attractive, eye-catching visuals

Appealing visuals grab a user’s attention and clearly show, rather than tell, your brand’s value proposition. Quality visuals create positive brand associations and encourage users to spend more time on your homepage.

Businesses have many options when considering which visuals to add to their homepage: lifestyle photography, background videos, animation, or high-quality product photos. The right choice depends on your brand, product, and audience. Consider these tips when selecting your homepage’s visuals:

• Align images with the brand color palette: Your brand's color palette helps evoke the emotions you want from your audience when they interact with your brand. For example, if you’re a wellness brand, you might opt for blue in your color palette (associated with calm). Your visuals must align with your brand’s color palette to ensure consistency. 
• Add compelling imagery above the fold: The hero section is the first section users see, so place your strongest visuals there. This initial visual impact sets the tone for your entire site experience.
• Structure related visuals in a carousel: Use components like image carousels to display product screenshots, resources, or other features. Ensure each image serves a clear purpose in your narrative by matching each image to a distinct product benefit or aspect of your value proposition. 
• Optimize video performance: Large videos can slow down sites, increasing bounce rates and impacting SEO performance. Before adding a video, ensure it’s integral to the user experience, doesn’t create performance bottlenecks (using tools like Google Lighthouse), and meets key accessibility requirements like playback controls to pause a looping background video. ‍
• Experiment continuously: Experiment with the type or format of media, content, and size to see what works best in showcasing your value proposition.

Ultimately, the right visual strategy fit will depend on the brand, product, and audience. For example, Hillbrook, a real estate company in New Zealand, used evocative, beautiful photography to showcase its value proposition of “authentic luxurious real estate.”

Meanwhile, Duckie, an AI support assistant for technical users, uses animation to show how their product works. This helps users easily understand how the product might integrate with their workflow.

Clear messaging

Given the limited time to catch a user’s attention, refining messaging and copy is a big homepage optimization opportunity. Messaging is how you speak about your brand; copy is how that messaging translates to actual words on the page. Let’s go over how you can bring this to life in the headline and body copy. 

Headline

The headline encapsulates the business's mission and philosophy in a few impactful words. Think of it as a quick sales pitch for your business—it should make sense to all potential target users (regardless of their level of awareness), encapsulate your unique voice, and avoid language that might alienate visitors. 

Ask yourself these questions when crafting your headline:

• What is your brand’s value proposition? What problem are you solving for your customers, and why does that matter to them? 
• What do you want visitors to feel when they read your headline?
• What’s the most important thing your audience needs to know when they learn about your product? What’s the “hook” that gets them excited about your business?

Hello Patient, a healthcare AI assistant, has a headline that speaks directly to their target audience with a clear and straightforward value prop (i.e., team efficiency).

Body copy

Your homepage’s body copy translates a brand's message into compelling words that work alongside your visuals and headline to tell your product's story. Think of it as the supporting actor to your visual elements—adding depth and detail without stealing the show.

When writing body copy, it should be as tight as possible. Attention spans are limited, so communicating concisely is key to getting your message across without losing your audience. 

Here are some other tips when refining your homepage’s body copy: 

• Align copy with brand voice: Your brand voice is your brand’s personality expressed through words, tone, and other design decisions (like color, aesthetics, etc.). Ensure your copy’s tone aligns with the brand voice to reinforce your brand's personality across your website. For example, if your brand voice is playful, use casual language (rather than formal jargon) in your copy.
• Focus on action-oriented statements: Avoid long, flowery descriptions. Instead, write clear, impactful statements that move visitors towards action. For example, instead of saying, “We’ll help you speed up the hiring process for your team,” rewrite it as, “Hire top talent in half the time.”‍
• Ensure your copy passes the "5-second test." Can someone understand what you do within 5 seconds of landing on the page? Remove any industry jargon or insider language that might confuse first-time visitors.

Let’s look at an example: Faye, a platform connecting families with executive assistants (dubbed “Family Advisors”), is a concept most visitors haven't encountered before. To educate users, they break down the process into three simple steps, each with a bold headline that captures the key point. Even without reading the details, visitors can quickly grasp how the service works by scanning the headlines.

Powerful social proof

Users need evidence that your product delivers on its promises. This is especially true for digital products, as users can only discover their value after trying them. Additionally, strong social proof builds brand trust and can boost your SEO ranking to drive more organic traffic. 

Here are five ways businesses can add social proof to their homepage:

• Customer logos: Showcasing well-known customers builds trust with potential visitors and validates your product's value. Ensure you receive your customer's permission before adding the logo to your website. 
• Testimonials: Solicit feedback and quotes that can be featured on your website, especially any statistics or qualitative insights. Start with short quotes that highlight successful customer experiences. Then, expand into detailed case studies that tell the full story: the customer's challenge, how your product helped, and the business impact.
• Reviews: This is unsolicited feedback from customers who have used your product. You can collect these by creating functionality for your website so that users can leave reviews or import them from platforms like Google, Trust Radius, and G2.
• Awards: Awards legitimize your product and strengthen your brand. For example, if your brand is about fostering innovation, showcasing awards like Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies can boost brand and product credibility.‍
• Certifications: Add any relevant certifications that showcase your product’s capabilities. This is especially relevant for businesses in highly regulated spaces, such as financial services or healthcare.

Remember: If you aren’t sure which type of social proof to display, run tests with different imagery, quotes, data, or statistics to see what drives engagement.

Effortless user experience

Your homepage's user experience (UX) connects all your visuals, messaging, and social proof. Without a good UX, these elements fall flat—or worse, actively frustrate visitors. Let’s break down the key components of a compelling homepage user experience: 

Page layout

A good homepage layout ensures that all the page elements are coherently structured. Many websites organize their page into distinct sections that communicate different information. For example, one section might focus on how a product works, whereas another might focus on social proof. 

Optimize your homepage layout by considering these tips:

• Create a clear visual hierarchy: Use color, size, and whitespace to clarify the visual hierarchy of the homepage. This helps users quickly scan your homepage and find the relevant sections that answer their questions. 

• Put your call-to-action (CTA) front and center: Position your primary CTA above the fold where users can't miss it. The button text should tell visitors what will happen when they click, like "Start Free Trial" or "View Demo." While your layout may evolve, never compromise the prominence of your CTA. 
• Experiment with content cutoffs to drive engagement: When visitors see partially revealed visuals, headings, or other content, their curiosity drives them to scroll down and discover more. This strategy (known as “content cutoffs”) creates intrigue on your homepage, further driving engagement. 

Site navigation

A well-organized navigation menu helps users find the content they need quickly, keeping them engaged.

When deciding on your site’s navigation strategy, keep these principles in mind: 

• Align your navigation with the site design: Whether you opt for a static menu bar or a mega menu that reveals every category or subcategory, your navigation should be a natural extension of your website. For more advice on choosing the best navigation design for your site, check out our navigation bar design best practices. 
• ‍Make site navigation compatible across devices: When implementing your site navigation, ensure it’s visible, and users can click on the elements across all devices, including mobile and desktop.

Mobile responsiveness

Beyond site navigation, it’s essential to ensure that other homepage elements also work across devices. As more users primarily use mobile devices to navigate the Internet, your homepage must function seamlessly on phones, tablets, and desktops. Follow these tips to create a device-agnostic homepage: 

• Implement responsive design: Responsive design allows you to create flexible elements and content that automatically adapt to a user’s device, ensuring mobile friendliness. 
• Regularly test mobile compatibility: Changes to your website can accidentally break mobile responsiveness. Use these tools to test and catch issues with mobile responsiveness on your homepage. 
• Consider using no-code platforms: Webflow and similar no-code platforms automatically create mobile-friendly designs, eliminating the need for custom code. 

Performance

A delay of a single second in page load time can result in 11% fewer page loads and up to 7% loss in conversion. Therefore, performance is a crucial factor in ensuring a seamless user experience. Here are some tips for optimizing your homepage’s speed: 

• Benchmark using Core Web Vitals framework: Google’s Core Web Vitals framework provides three speed metrics (along with benchmarks) that comprehensively measure a website’s performance. You can use these metrics to assess your site performance. 
• Monitor media usage: Visuals are among the most significant performance detractors. To speed up your homepage, use lightweight image files and set them to lazy load, so the visuals load progressively as users scroll down the page. 
• Use tools to identify opportunities: Run your homepage through tools like Google Lighthouse or SEMRush to identify opportunities to boost your site’s performance. If you’ve built your site on Webflow, you can use tools like Webflow Analyze to visualize all site performance metrics in one place, making it easy to identify performance optimization opportunities.

Bonus: Personalization based on the user

Every visitor arrives at your homepage with different needs. Here's how to personalize key elements for each audience: 

• Messaging: Adapt your headlines and copy to match the user's specific needs. For example, if the visitor is new, your messaging might be more general and inviting. For existing customers, consider copy that acknowledges their business by welcoming them back. 
• CTA: Direct each audience to their next step by changing the CTA. For example, you might target a new visitor with free trials or demos, whereas existing customers might receive product recommendations or upsells. 
• Images: Select visuals that speak to each visitor's journey. Show product overviews to new customers, switch up imagery for repeat visitors, and feature advanced capabilities to existing customers.

Pro-tip: Scale your homepage testing with Webflow Optimize

The best homepages are constantly evolving. As audiences and brands mature, your team should continuously test and iterate to keep your content fresh and impactful.

Webflow Optimize takes the legwork out of continuous optimization to help you understand and scale what’s performing well. Teams can run experiments quickly and easily, comparing different content variations, headlines, images, and CTAs across the homepage to boost engagement and conversions—all in a few clicks. Maximize your homepage’s potential and try Webflow Optimize today.