Every homepage we build starts the same way: a sheet of paper with one question at the top. What does a stranger need to know in the first ten seconds to decide this business is for them? Everything else on the page is there to support that answer or to move the visitor to the next step.
Most homepages we are asked to fix fail that test. They open with a slogan, a slideshow and a welcome paragraph, and a new visitor still cannot tell what the company sells, where it works or what it costs to get started. Here is how we put one together instead.
These are the sections we sketch before any design work begins. Not every business needs them in this exact order, but almost every business needs all six.
Your headline should say what you do and who it is for, in words a customer would use. "Family dentistry in Northeast Portland, with evening hours" beats "Smiles that last a lifetime." The first one tells a parent searching on their phone that they are in the right place. The second one could belong to any dentist in the country.
A good test: cover your logo and read the headline out loud. If it could sit on a competitor's site without anyone noticing, rewrite it.
Decide what you want a ready buyer to do, and put that button in the first screen. For a clinic it is "Book an appointment." For a builder it is usually "Get an estimate." For a software team it might be "Start a free trial." Pick one. Two buttons of equal weight make people stop and think, and thinking is where they leave.
You can offer a softer second option, like "See our work," styled as a text link rather than a second big button.
Right under the opening section, show that real people have trusted you. This can be a row of client logos, a star rating with the number of reviews, a short quote with a name and a photo, or a single number that matters ("1,200 kitchens remodeled since 2009"). Keep it short. A wall of twenty logos reads as noise; four or five recognizable ones read as proof.
List your main services or products in three to six groups, each with a one-line description and a link to its own page. Hawthorne Family Dental, a client of ours, went from fourteen service links on the homepage to four groups: checkups and cleanings, fillings and crowns, Invisalign, and emergency visits. Calls about "do you do X?" dropped because people could finally find X.
If you want to go deeper on the pages those links point to, we wrote a separate guide on how to write a services page.
Three or four steps that show a new customer what happens after they reach out. "Call or book online. We confirm within one business day. Your first visit takes 45 minutes." This section removes the fear of the unknown, which is the most common reason people hesitate.
End the page with the same primary action you used at the top, plus one reassuring line: a response time, a guarantee, or what the first step costs. Someone who has scrolled to the bottom is interested. Do not make them scroll back up to act.
Cutting is harder than adding, because every item on a homepage has someone in the business who wanted it there. These are the things we remove most often, with the reasons we give clients.
The single biggest change you can make is to write the homepage text before anyone opens a design tool. When words come last, they get squeezed into boxes that were drawn for placeholder text, and the result is vague copy that fits the layout instead of the customer.
Our process is simple. We write the headline, the action, the proof, the service groups, the steps and the closing line in a plain document. We read it out loud to someone who does not know the business. If they can tell us what the company does and what to do next, the copy is ready for design.
Here is a homepage outline we wrote for Ridgeline Builders, a remodeling company in Tigard, Oregon. It fit on half a page.
That is the whole page. It looks simple because the hard thinking happened before the design.
You do not need a redesign to improve your homepage. Try this:
If you would like a second pair of eyes, send us your homepage and we will tell you the three changes we would make first. You can also see how we approached this for other clients in our case studies.