How much should you care about your home page?

Some folks will tell you that your site’s home page doesn’t matter that much – Avinash Kaushik advises people not to “obsess” over it, and I have said things like that myself. Why? Because many of your customers probably enter somewhere else. But while it’s true you shouldn’t obsess, does that mean you should ignore your home page? Of course not.

In all likelihood, your home page isn’t the most visited page on your site. And there may be other deserving candidates for improvement. But, assuming you home page is one of your top pages, it’s easiest to think of it as just a different sort of landing page.

As with any landing page, you still have to start by answering the following questions:

• Who is the visitor?
• Why did she come here?
• What questions does she have?
• How can you help her answer those questions?

You get extra credit if you also think about where the customer came from. But focus on those other four first.

Unlike a traditional landing page, the answers to your customer’s question is usually somewhere else on the site. But if you make your home page language match what your customer is looking for, you can draw them deeper into your site, improve your bounce rate and increase your customer’s satisfaction.

Does your home page answer your customers’ questions? Or is it a dead end? Because it really boils down to this: if you don’t care about your home page, neither will your customers.

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