Is the Homepage the most important page of a website?
The homepage is the most important page on any website and receives the most views of any page, according to Homepage Usability. A poorly designed home page may overwhelm visitors and cause them to leave the website. The dissemination of a company's identity and values is a crucial function of home pages1. Although each website is unique the following four pages are the most significant (and frequently most-visited) pages on a website: Blog2, Home, About Us, and Contact Us pages.
According to a top web design Malaysian company website's homepage is crucial because it:
1. Acts as the first page visitors see after entering the website's URL3,4.
2. aids visitors in comprehending the offerings on your website5.
3. It's essential for SEO since it must provide Google with a clear understanding of what your site is about and the kinds of queries it should rank for5. It can make or break your conversion rates6.
4. Your website's load speed will either keep visitors engaged or result in site abandonment.
5. The initial component of the user experience is the home page. Interface, design, color scheme, usability, and simplicity all play a role in determining whether a visitor stays or leaves.
6. Your benefits must be made very apparent on the home page. albeit not entire essays. People today prefer a quick world, so they don't like to read lengthy websites. Make sure your home page's main headlines provide teasers of your services.
7. Your website serves as the book's cover. The quality of its contents will be compared to the caliber of your offerings.
8. If your home page doesn't make people feel welcome, they won't bother to stay.
9. Rather than just randomly blotting out your services, it's a dialogue tool to engage users. Your on-site digital marketing effort that attracted them is useless if you can't keep them.
Misinformation about the homepage 6
The following two common misconceptions concerning homepages:
1. The first impression is made by the homepage.
2. The most crucial page on a website is the homepage because it receives the most visitors.
Both misunderstandings are founded on the assumption that a website's homepage serves as the first page visitors see when they arrive. Designers spend numerous hours optimizing the homepage because they want to make a good first impression and give a consumer all the crucial information about a product or service right away.
It makes a first impression, but is that true?
A long time ago, to access a website, users had to enter its URL in the address bar of their browser. Since then, people's online behavior has altered, and many now access websites using search engines, social media, links from other websites, or newsletters. In reality, pages other than the homepage will receive more than half of a website's traffic. It is now accepted that most visitors to websites enter through a side door rather than the homepage. A few of the numerous methods visitors can find your website are as follows:
Not every user enters through the main door. They access websites in different ways.
As a result, we can infer that any page on your website could serve as a user's beginning point (or entrance). The majority of website visitors never view the homepage. Consequently, a website's home page differs from a book's cover. Every web page must convey the website's main objective and establish a positive first impression. Additionally, each page must inform users of their location and other available options while they are on the website.
Is it actually the most crucial page?
Even while your website's homepage may receive the most visitors, this does not necessarily indicate that you should focus all of your efforts on optimizing it. The site is merely a phase in the user journey and not the end point, which is one important reason for this. A homepage serves a comparable function to a hotel lobby during a user's journey. Although the lobby is a necessary component of every hotel, it's not where guests want to hang out. People visit hotels to stay in rooms, not to hang around in the lobby. The homepage is not where visitors spend the majority of their time on websites.
how visitors use home pages.
For a homepage to be designed properly, it is essential to comprehend how people use them. Jared Spool's team discovered through research on user behavior that there are just two key features offered on the homepage:
When consumers visit a news site's homepage looking for the most recent news, for example, the homepage either provides them with that information or links them to it.
Alternatively, it brings them closer to the page with the material.
Users solely care about a homepage for those two reasons. Simple logic behind this: People look for specific information, not generic information, thus the majority of the content on the site has very little to do with the visitor and their needs. In order to find what they are genuinely looking for, they bypass the site.
Designers waste valuable design resources when they attempt to make the homepage perform additional tasks (such as display the most recent news from a company). This is because visitors typically have little interest in this type of content. The chart that follows exemplifies this issue.
Finally, when browsing, the majority of people are searching for a specific item or piece of information. They can find this information on the homepage, which also acts as the starting point for any user activity on the website. However, don't count on impressing visitors with your homepage alone. Remember that the homepage is only one stage of your user's trip, so it's crucial to get them off as soon as possible!
REF:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_page
2. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/optimize-important-website-pages
3. https://graticle.com/blog/the-most-important-pages-on-a-website/
4. https://qr.ae/pygL2L
5. https://www.demandjump.com/blog/what-are-the-most-important-pages-on-a-website
6. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2017/11/23/ux-mythbusting-is-the-homepage-really-the-most-important-part-of-your-website
