What should actually be on my homepage?
The short answer
Five things, in this order: what you are and where, the one action you want a visitor to take, the answers they came for, proof that you are real, and how to reach you. Most homepages fail by leading with a large image and a slogan, which answers nothing — a visitor decides in seconds whether you are what they were looking for.
On this page
What a visitor is actually doing
They arrived from a search, a referral or a link. They have a question, and they are deciding — in a few seconds — whether this page is going to answer it.
They are not admiring your photography. They are scanning for confirmation that they are in the right place. Everything below follows from that.
The five things, in order
1. What you are, and where
Within the first screen, without scrolling: what kind of business this is and roughly where it is.
"Neighbourhood Italian in [area], open seven days" does this. "Passion. Craft. Community." does not — it could be a restaurant, a gym or a design agency, and the visitor has to work to find out.
This is the most commonly wasted space on the internet: a large image with a slogan over it, answering nothing.
2. The one thing you want them to do
Book, order, call, get directions. One, prominent, repeated further down the page.
Not five equally-weighted buttons. A visitor faced with several equal options frequently chooses none — and a homepage with one obvious action outperforms one with a menu of them.
3. The answers they came for
The three or four things people actually check: hours, prices or a menu, location, whether you take bookings.
These should be reachable in one click from the homepage, and the most-checked one should be on it. For a restaurant, the menu. For a gym, the timetable. For a tradesperson, the service area.
4. Proof you are real and competent
Photographs of the actual place — not stock images. Reviews or a rating. Certifications where they matter. A named human if you are a one-person business.
This is where a visitor decides whether to trust you enough to act, and it is often skipped entirely on otherwise polished sites.
5. How to reach you
A phone number as tappable text, an email, and the address. Visible without hunting, ideally in the footer of every page as well.
What should not be there
A photo carousel. Consistently ignored, and it slows the page. Visitors see the first slide and scroll past.
A welcome message. "Welcome to our website" is a sentence that does no work.
A "we are passionate about..." paragraph where the specifics should be. Passion is claimed by everyone and believed from nobody.
Autoplaying video or sound. It costs load time and goodwill.
A popup before they have read anything. Asking someone to join a mailing list before they know what you sell is asking a stranger for their number in the first sentence.
The test
Show your homepage to someone who does not know your business, for five seconds, then take it away and ask three questions:
- What does this business do?
- Where is it?
- What did it want you to do?
If they cannot answer all three, the problem is the order rather than the design. And that is good news, because the order is much cheaper to change.
Why homepages drift out of order
The reason so many homepages fail that test is not that nobody knew the right order. It is that the homepage was written once, at launch, and the business changed underneath it.
The new service went on a separate page because adding it to the homepage meant a quote. The photograph everybody dislikes is still there because replacing it is a small job nobody wants to raise. The seasonal offer from March is still the first thing a visitor sees in September.
None of that is a design problem, and a redesign will not fix it — it produces a correct homepage that drifts again in eighteen months. What fixes it is being able to change the words and the pictures yourself on a Tuesday afternoon: the headline, the photograph, the offer, the thing you lead with.
That is what a dashboard is for, and it is why Helm wires those to fields you control. The structure itself stays deliberate — the sections are set when the site is designed, which is precisely what stops a homepage turning into a scrapbook — but what sits inside them is yours to change without asking anyone.