Why your homepage doesn’t matter!

wordwriteagenc
April 18, 2014

Well, that’s not entirely true; your homepage matters. All of the pages of your website matter. It’s just that the homepage isn’t as preeminently important as many business leaders think, and hasn’t been for a long time.

Many people have drawn comparisons between website homepages and newspaper front pages. This is a throwback to the halcyon days of print media where above-the-fold headlines were drivers of newspaper sales; these purchases would be equivalent to ‘clicks’ that drive traffic to a website in our modern electronic world. The difference is that a newspaper has one attraction and entry point – the front page – and websites can have thousands of pages, each serving as an entry point. Search, social media and dark social (texts, email and IM clients) can attract entry through the side door, right into the content. That means each page is an opportunity to attract new visitors.

Headlines are still used to grab attention; that much is obvious when you search for everything from news stories to professional services. The difference is that every page of your website can serve as an entry point. Unlike newspapers, which typically are read starting at the front page, a professional service firm’s website can have a blog creating new opportunities to be found each time it posts. Regular blogging means many opportunities to be found through Google search! The days of relying on single headlines – or a single web page – are long gone.

This is both an exceptional opportunity and responsibility.

The opportunity exists because there now are many entry points into your website. The responsibility exists because it’s up to you (or hired content creators) to create these entry points into your website by generating great content, and optimizing it in a way that will allow Google’s algorithms to register it higher on its search index. The more content that exists on your site, the greater your chances of attracting visitors. The better the content, the more likely visitors are to revisit and look at other pages.

Consider Buzzfeed. Social media is littered with links to compellingly titled lists, articles and infographics, the progeny of an army of content creators. Odds are that if you’ve ever visited, you entered through a search or link found on social media. For instance, when I saw 77 Facts That Sound Like Complete Lies But Are Completely True on Facebook, I clicked. There goes 10 minutes. You win again, BuzzFeed…

When being redirected to articles straightaway, there’s no need to go through BuzzFeed’s homepage. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever even been on BuzzFeed’s homepage, and to this end, mine represents the majority of Buzzfeed experiences: 54 percent of Buzzfeed traffic comes from search or social media shares that link directly to a page within the website. Even institutional powerhouses with name recognition like the New York Times get slightly less traffic from its homepage than they do from links around the web.

Richard Gingras, Google’s head of news products, addressed how this changing dynamic of the Internet affects how website design should be approached.

“Four years ago, many news sites saw half their traffic come to the homepage. Today, due to continued growth in traffic from search and social, homepage traffic is typically 25 percent of inbound audience. That means 75 percent of inbound traffic is going directly to story pages. How do changes in audience flows impact site design? Indeed, how do they cause reconsideration of the very definition of a website? Should we not flip the model and put dramatically more focus on the story page rather than the home page? Or, for that matter, that corpus of content and media we call a ‘story’?”

So what should you do?

Don’t scrap your homepage. It’s still an opportunity to showcase your brand and establish the context of who you are and why you do it. However, as WordWrite President and CEO Paul Furiga explains, a pleasant viewing experience serves as nothing more than table stakes – looking good only gets you in the door. Then what?