OK, well maybe dead is an exaggeration, but ask yourself, what is the point of the homepage?

Typically, I’d hear:

  • serves as the first point of contact for users
  • educates the user about the product / provides a hook
  • directs users across your website
  • the starting point and key for SEO

And these all sound like nice enough reasons but let’s dive a little deeper and hopefully I can help you to rethink your homepage. I’m going to focus on e-commerce, but generalisations of these points can be applied to other verticals.

Serves as the first point of contact for users

I would argue that for many businesses this isn’t the case, or at the very least, it doesn’t need to be the case. As the easy example, take a new e-commerce platform. For them, the majority of traffic is probably from customers searching items and then finding the website through paid channels or even organic. Whatever the case, they know what they want and they should be taken straight to the item, not sent through the homepage or any other ‘blocker’ to getting them what they want.

What about someone doing a general search? Be more targeted. The majority of users have something in mind when they’re searching, so don’t be lazy and serve the homepage, serve them what they want. Are they looking for specific items? Show them! Are they wanting to see your shipping prices? Send them to your pricing! Do they want to see the technical details of your product? Send them straight to your wiki! Yes, there will be generic cases, but test where you’re sending them, analyse the search terms customers are coming through, optimise, optimise, optimise!

Still, this is for heavily intent-driven users, let’s go into users who are just learning about your product/service, where you need to educate them.

Educates the user about the product

This is a good point, education is important. You want to tell the customer why you’re different, you want to show them that you’ve worked really hard on your plan to differentiate and your three key selling points. I’m sorry to say, your user probably doesn’t care. At least, not that much that they want a whole page about it. Instead, why not show them the products they want straight away and highlight any point that make a real difference to them right there on the product page.

I’ve seen booking.com do this really well. On hotel pages they highlight what other customers like about the specific hotel and it helps me to make decisions. When I’m checking out they highlight they’ve got a great cancellation policy. I get the information I want delivered as I need it, no showboating required. Some customers may still want to compare policies and you should still have policies somewhere, but remember that what you care about isn’t necessarily what the customer cares about.

Further to this, affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing sources for ecommerce, with now more than 15% of revenue coming from affiliates with no sign of slowing down. In fact, nearly three-quarters (74%) of US shoppers say they visit two to three nonretail websites before completing a purchase, and 16% say they visit more than four websites, according to Rakuten and Forrester. And why do they do this? They want to learn about what they’re going to buy and they want to see what others think about it. With a good affiliate marketing programme you can educate your users off your website through a medium that they are far more likely to trust and value. These articles can then link direct to products, no homepage required.

Directs users across your website

The typical scenario: user lands on a product, they don’t like it, they click the logo and are directed back to the homepage. If I don’t direct to the homepage, what will happen?! Again, is there something else that could be done? Does the user need to see the homepage or is that just the easiest thing to do?

If they’re browsing a particular product, make it easy for them to get to the list of all products in that category, or to see reviews of your products or affiliate stories discussing your products in depth.

Actually, many websites already doing this. Ever seen a ‘similar products’ list? A ‘recommended products’ list? This combined with, the above and a bit of deep learning magic can actually allow the user to find what they need faster and decrease overall drop-off.

The starting point and key for SEO

Ah, SEO, the mysteries never stop. Often the homepage is stated to be a must for good SEO as this is where the crawler starts and it is what links all the content together. Having a high ranking homepage will lead to an improvement on rankings across the board, right? Maybe, but is the homepage the most important content to rank highly on?

You may have heard the term cornerstone content which refers to the content that you’re most proud of, the cornerstones of your business, if you will. Cornerstones play a significant role in SEO content by providing a focus point, allowing you to tackle ranking on tough keywords. By focusing your SEO efforts on cornerstone content, which can be customised and targeted to your most important keywords and linked together at the top of your SEO pyramid, you can achieve much better overall SEO than if you put all your efforts into the one generic homepage.

Conclusion

So hopefully you’ve got the point that while I don’t suggest you delete your homepage, you shouldn’t use it as an ‘easy out’ for when you’re not sure what to do with a user. Check your homepage, traffic, where are they coming from? Where are they going? You should understand this and look to reduce the number of users on your homepage and increase those converting on your products!