What Your Homepage Should Say in the First Five Seconds

A visitor gives your homepage a few seconds to answer three questions. What is this, is it for me, and what do I do next. Most business homepages in Nepal answer none of them above the fold.

The headline test

Read your headline and ask whether a competitor in an unrelated industry could use it unchanged.

"Transforming businesses through innovative solutions." "Your trusted partner for growth." "Excellence, delivered." Each of these could sit on a bank, a consultancy, a courier or a software company, which means it tells a visitor nothing about any of them.

The replacement is usually a plain sentence about what you actually do and who for. "Accounting software for Nepali retailers." "We install and service industrial generators in the Kathmandu Valley." Neither is clever. Both are immediately useful, and useful outperforms clever on a homepage every time.

Say who it is not for

Businesses resist this because it feels like turning away work. It does the opposite: it makes the right visitor more confident they are in the right place.

"For businesses with 10 to 200 staff" tells a small shop to look elsewhere and tells a mid-sized company that you understand their situation. Trying to speak to everyone produces copy that speaks to nobody.

One obvious next step

Pick the single action you most want a visitor to take and make it visible without scrolling. Call, book, browse, enquire. One.

Homepages with five equally weighted buttons produce fewer actions than homepages with one, because a visitor who has to choose often chooses nothing. The other paths can exist further down the page.

Make the button say what happens. "Get a quote" is better than "Learn more", because the visitor knows what they are agreeing to.

Prices, or at least a range

The most common reason a visitor leaves without contacting you is that they could not tell whether you were within their budget and did not want to start a conversation to find out.

Publishing a starting price loses you the enquiries you were going to lose anyway, further down the process and after both sides have spent time. It keeps the ones who can afford you and who now trust you slightly more for having said.

If your work genuinely varies too much for a fixed price, publish a range with what drives it. That is still more useful than silence.

Proof, not adjectives

"Trusted", "leading", "premium" and "world-class" are claims a company makes about itself, and every visitor discounts them automatically.

Replace them with things that can be checked. The names of clients who agreed to be named. A photograph of finished work. A specific outcome for a specific customer. One checkable fact does more than a paragraph of adjectives, because the visitor can verify it and the adjectives they cannot.

What to cut

The autoplaying slider. The popup that appears before anyone has read anything. The mission statement. The stock photograph of people shaking hands in an office that is not yours.

Each costs load time and attention, and none of them answers the three questions. A homepage that loads quickly and says one clear thing outperforms a longer one that says several vague things, and it costs less to build.

A quick exercise

Show your homepage to someone outside your industry for five seconds, then take it away and ask them what your business does. If they cannot tell you, the headline is the problem, and it is the cheapest thing on the site to fix.