Tips for Homepages

Content Strategy for Homepages

Hit the highlights

Some people may come to your website and only ever see the homepage, so you want to make sure every piece of content counts.

You can think of your homepage as similar to a brochure. Ideally, it will be rich with imagery and short, impactful copy that gives an overview of what your website is about.

Write teasers of important content

Every piece of content on the homepage should have a call to action (CTA) that leads to more information or a desired action (i.e., “Apply Now”). We call these “teasers” — small pieces of content with at least a heading, description and links. These are often displayed using various types of card groups. A teaser should have enough information to make it clear to a reader whether or not the information they seek may be on that page.

In general, it’s a good idea to link off to every major section of your website on the homepage. However, you shouldn’t limit yourself to linking to these landing pages. Sometimes the most popular content on a website is a specific standard page with important content. When deciding what pages to link to on your homepage, be sure to include both the pages that are most important to your goals and the pages that are most relevant to your audience.

Write to make your content easy to read

When writing for the web, it’s important to help website visitors know what they want to read — and what they don’t.

• Group like content together: Use components to visually and semantically group related content.
• Use helpful headings: Break up content with helpful headings that clearly indicate what type of content is beneath them.
• Write descriptive link text: It should be clear where a reader will go if they click on the linked words without having to read anything else.
• Keep it short: Write using short words, sentences and paragraphs. Get to the point as quickly as possible.