TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
Almost every home page I am asked to fix has the same problem, and it is not the design. It is that a stranger can read the whole top of the page and still not know what the business does, who it is for, or what to do next. I'm TJ Slade, I build small business websites, and knowing what to put on your home page is the difference between a site that works and a site that merely exists.
The pressure is real. Nielsen Norman Group's research on how long users stay on a page puts the window at ten to twenty seconds unless the page makes its value obvious, and people who make it past that first stretch tend to stay much longer. So the home page is not a brochure cover. It is a ten second audition, and everything below is about winning it.
The short answer: six things, in this order
Nearly every good small business home page carries these six, in roughly this sequence:
- What you do, in the words your customer would use, at the very top.
- Who it is for and where you do it, so a visitor can rule themselves in or out.
- Proof that you have done it before: photos, reviews, names, numbers.
- One clear action, repeated down the page.
- A short path deeper: your main services or products, linked.
- How to reach you, without hunting for it.
That is the whole checklist. Everything else on a home page is decoration, which is fine as long as it does not push those six down the screen.
Say what you do in plain words, at the top
The first line a visitor reads should be understandable to someone who has never heard of you. Not a slogan, not a value, not a welcome. Kitchen and bath remodeling in Overland Park. Family dentistry, accepting new patients. Custom sheet metal fabrication, prototypes to production runs. Those are all boring sentences, and every one of them beats innovative solutions for a modern world.
The test I use is simple. Cover your logo with your hand, read the top of your page, and ask whether a stranger could tell someone else what you sell. If they could not, that is the first thing to fix, and it costs nothing but a rewrite.
Proof beats adjectives
Anyone can write quality workmanship on a website, which is exactly why it persuades nobody. Proof is specific and hard to fake: photos of your actual work, three real reviews with first names and towns, the number of years or jobs or clients, the logos of places you have worked for, a certification that took effort to earn.
Put a piece of proof high on the page, not buried on a testimonials page nobody visits. One honest review directly under your headline does more than a whole page of them two clicks away.
One action, repeated
Most home pages ask for too many things. Call us, fill out this form, subscribe, follow us, download the guide, book a consult, chat with us now. Every extra option costs you a few of the people who would have done the main one. Pick the single action that makes you money, put it at the top, and repeat it two or three times as the page goes on so nobody has to scroll back up.
If your business runs on phone calls, the action is a tappable phone number and everything else is secondary. If it runs on quotes, it is a short form. Whatever it is, make the button say what happens next. Get a quote and Send a message both beat Submit.
What belongs below the fold
Once the top of the page has done its job, the rest of a home page is a hallway. It should point people at the two or three places they most likely want to go and then get out of the way:
- Your main services or products, three to six of them, each linking to a real page with real detail.
- A short section about you, written like a person, with a face in it. People buy from people.
- Location and service area, if customers need to know whether you come to them.
- Answers to the two or three questions you get asked on every call, price and timeline included.
- Contact details in the footer: phone, email, address, hours. All of it, every page.
Depth belongs on the pages underneath, not on the home page. A home page that tries to say everything ends up as a wall nobody reads, and it makes the whole site slower for no benefit.
What to leave off
These show up on home page after home page and earn their space almost never:
- The rotating slider. People stop reading before slide two, so you paid to hide your own message behind an animation.
- Welcome to our website. It is the digital equivalent of a paragraph explaining that this is a paragraph.
- The mission statement at the top. Keep it, move it to the about page, where the people who care about it are.
- Stock photos of handshakes and generic offices. They read as a business that has nothing real to show.
- A menu with fourteen items. If everything is in the navigation, nothing is.
- Autoplaying video with sound, and anything that covers the page before a visitor has read a word.
- Awards, badges, and social icons stacked above your actual offer.
Weight matters too. Sliders, heavy video, and uncompressed photos are the usual reason a home page crawls on a phone, and website speed affects whether anyone sees the page at all. Cutting the slider is often the single fastest performance fix available.
A ten minute check you can run yourself
Open your home page on your phone, with wifi off, and go through this honestly:
- Time it. Is the page readable in about three seconds?
- Cover the logo. Can a stranger tell what you sell from the first screen?
- Find the action. Is there one obvious next step, and is it above the fold?
- Find the proof. Is there a photo, review, or number in the first two screens?
- Find the phone number. How many taps? It should be zero or one.
- Read it out loud. Does any sentence sound like a person, or does all of it sound like a brochure?
Most home pages fail two or three of those, and most of the failures are copy rather than design. That is good news, because copy is the part you can fix yourself this afternoon without paying anyone.
If the list is longer than the afternoon
Sometimes the home page is not the problem, it is the symptom, and the rest of the site is thin underneath it. If your check turned up more than a few items, it is worth reading the signs a website is quietly losing customers before deciding what to spend. When you do want it handled, the pricing page has the ranges and the contact form reaches me directly. Send me your home page and I will tell you which of the six it is missing.