Your homepage doesn’t need to tell everyone everything

A homepage has a difficult job, but that doesn’t mean it needs to do every job.

One of the most common things I see is businesses trying to get absolutely everything above the fold.

Every service. Every audience. Every award. Every reason to trust them. Three calls to action. A paragraph about the founder. A testimonial. A newsletter signup.

At some point it stops being useful and just becomes noise.

A homepage really needs to answer a few important questions quickly.

Who are you?

What do you do?

Is this relevant to me?

Where should I go next?

Everything else can unfold from there.

That doesn’t mean making it vague or minimal for the sake of it. It just means deciding what matters most.

If somebody lands on the site cold, they probably don’t need your entire company history in the first thirty seconds. They need enough information to understand whether they’re in the right place.

Then you can earn the next scroll.

I think that’s where good hierarchy comes in.

Not everything has to shout.

Some things need to lead, some things need to support, and some things can wait until somebody is actually interested enough to look for them.