Your website homepage is, in essence, your digital storefront.
It plays a pivotal role in defining how your brand is perceived by visitors and serves as the first impression your potential customers will have.
As the gateway to your online presence, it acts as the foundation for building trust, credibility, and engagement. For marketers who are navigating a new B2B website, understanding the key principles of an effective homepage is the first step to a successful project.
In this article, we introduce our seven fundamentals for creating an effective website homepage. Each fundamental offers practical advice and actionable steps to make your homepage look beautiful and perform brilliantly.
Prospects visiting your website usually have a clear objective in mind.
They may be looking for information about your services, seeking to contact your team, or exploring articles to solve a specific problem.
Your homepage must be designed with their intent in mind, providing an intuitive user journey that makes it easy to find what they need quickly and efficiently.
Thus, clear navigation is one of the most critical aspects of creating a positive user experience.
Complex menus, hidden pages, and unclear navigation labels can leave users frustrated and more likely to abandon your site in favour of a competitor. HotJar’s "Frustrated Clicks" feature is an excellent tool for identifying poor navigation patterns by tracking users who click repeatedly out of frustration. This data can highlight areas of your site and navigation that require immediate attention.
To address this issue, evaluate whether your menus are organised logically and if key pages are easy to access.
Simplify your menu structure to avoid overwhelming users, and ensure that crucial information or actions are no more than two clicks away.
Furthermore, consider conducting user testing to understand how your audience interacts with your site and uncover additional opportunities to improve navigation Tools such as UserTesting or, once again, HotJar can help you conduct these tests to ensure your website is navigable and user-friendly.
Your unique positioning statement sets the expectation for your audience as to what they can expect from your product and website.
It tells your visitors who you are, what you do, the problems you solve and, most importantly, why they should care. It should be able to communicate that you’re very sure about the challenges you solve for your clients, instilling confidence in your solution. A well-crafted positioning statement should appeal to both an emotional response within your audience, but also reassure them that you’re the answer to the prayers (a bit dramatic but you get the point.)
Take our client College Online.
We supported them in devising a positioning statement which clearly defines the service they offer (Higher Technical Qualifications) and sets the expectations for their audience. This has been partnered with the statement “Courses that Really Boost your Career” to incorporate an emotionally resonant message for the audience to take action - to ‘break their status quo’.
You see, we see USP’s and messaging statements to address two things:
However, it’s important to note that refining your positioning and messaging requires a lot of testing and iteration.
Use tools like HubSpot’s A/B testing feature to experiment with different variations or try messaging-specific tools like Wynter to gain first-party insights into how an audience within your target sector perceives your value proposition.
Additionally, ensure that your USP is prominently displayed on your homepage, ideally in the hero section, to make an immediate impact. Beyond placement, consider enhancing your USP with supportive visuals, frameworks or short taglines that reinforce its message, creating a cohesive and compelling introduction to your brand.
A lot of home pages suffer from information overload - and this is perfectly understandable.
Businesses are often multi-faceted, with different services and solutions dependent on the requirement. However, this can lead to an overload of CTAs with the audience unsure of what their next step is. This is why, when wireframing your B2B website homepage, you need to make sure that your user journeys are mapped out and you have a clear understanding of where your audience needs to go to find the right information about the product they need.
Inciper successfully does this on its website. As an MSP, it provides outsourced IT support to businesses. As you can imagine, its services are broad, so it focuses on providing solutions based on pain points and challenges businesses may be facing with their IT. For each challenge, it has a CTA attached so that the user has a clear journey to take and a definitive next step.
In addition to this, this section is only a third of the way down the page meaning that the user doesn’t have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find what they were looking for.
Like the section above, HubSpot’s A/B testing functionality can help you choose the CTA design, copy and placement based on conversion rates and how often they’re clicked upon.
To take this level of data further, HotJar can show you screenshots, videos and live data of people using your website. This is especially useful to understand the placement and design of your CTAs, whether they’re too hidden or blend into the page too much for example. The key with CTAs is iteration, ensuring that you’re using data to fuel the changes on your B2B homepage.
We can’t stress this enough - information architecture hinges on the information you acquire from your user journey analysis.
Your homepage must prioritise content in a way that aligns with user needs and expectations. If not, users may scan your homepage, not find what they’re looking for, and go to a competitor’s website instead.
Proper information hierarchy ensures users can quickly find what they need, reducing bounce rates. Our best tip for achieving success with your IA is using sales call insights.
Doing this will help you determine which information resonates most with your audience by analysing:
This section may seem complicated but we like to sum it up like this: map your audience’s user journey, prioritise your content accordingly, reduce clutter and make sure your CTAs remain clear.
According to Invesp, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Think about it like this - when was the last time you made a B2B purchase without asking for a case study or proof of concept with a business in a similar situation/sector?
Social proof gives your business a personal touch, showing that your company has solved similar problems before and, most importantly, has a track record of helping customers like your audience. Double this up with video case studies, and then you both have written testimonials but also a personal touch on your B2B homepage.
Huthwaite’s homepage, for example, features a prominent client testimonial slider, breaking up the page and adding credibility.
Incorporate testimonials, a logo carousel, or case studies on your homepage. Make sure you remember to highlight your customers’ success stories to stamp your authority - and reinforce yourself in the minds of your audience.
All the points above cover the ‘convert’ and ‘delight’ parts of the flywheel - but what about ‘attract’?
You need to make sure that your website adheres to SEO best practices in order for it to increase visibility and rank for keywords on search engines. Optimising your homepage based on keyword research ensures that your website shows up on Google when your audience comes ‘into market’.
Google uses ‘crawlers’ to identify what your website and content is talking about and ranks it against search terms based on their feedback.
This means, that when writing copy on your B2B website homepage, it should based upon extensive keyword research conducted beforehand. Make sure there’s a single primary keyword that’s the main focus on your homepage, whilst scattering secondary keywords naturally throughout the page. This ensures that you have a broad coverage of keywords that crawlers can pick up and place your page accordingly towards those keywords.
Although not strictly ‘on-page’, ensure that your meta titles and descriptions set the expectation to the user about what they can expect on your homepage. Meta information doesn’t affect SEO rankings, but greatly increases click-through rates from Google and other search engines to your website. By not doing this, Google will take an excerpt from your homepage which may not resonate as well with your target audience.
Potentially less important on your homepage than other service, pillar and blog pages, off-page SEO still plays a valuable role in promoting your homepage on Google.
Off-page SEO can significantly enhance the ranking of your home page by improving its authority, trustworthiness, and relevance in search engines. Since the home page often serves as the central hub of a website, strong off-page signals can boost its visibility and organic performance.
You can do this by linking through to your home page via blogs and other adjacent content on your website, but also by deploying a backlinking strategy, pushing users from other, more authoritative websites to your B2B website homepage.
The ugly sister of the SEO triplets, technical SEO is vital to how your website ranks on search engines.
Technical SEO involves optimising your website for:
Making sure your website runs smoothly and as they expect is key to climbing the rankings for search engine optimisation.
Content is not only the backbone of your website homepage - it’s the backbone of any inbound marketing strategy.
It not only informs but also engages visitors, building trust and encouraging them to explore further. After all, B2B buyers often consume 3–7 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative. Make sure your high-quality content is on display on your B2B website homepage which allows your audience to read your insights before they ‘raise their hand’ and speak to your sales team.
A homepage that does this well is Bridge Coffee Roasters.
They display authoritative blogs on their homepage, guiding visitors to learn more about their offerings. They also feature links to key content pieces that align with their audience’s needs.
As with any article, ensure your content is well-written, visually appealing, and regularly updated. Use the subject-matter experts within your business to fuel and write your content - this automatically gives validity and authority to your content.
Your homepage is the foundation of your digital presence, and optimising it can significantly impact your marketing and sales success. By implementing these seven fundamentals—from clear navigation to high-quality content—you can create a homepage that not only looks professional but also drives real results.
Take the first step by applying 2–3 of these tips to your homepage. If you’re unsure where to start, consider seeking external guidance to ensure your homepage becomes a lead-generating powerhouse (hint hint…).
Looking for more data-driven insights to drive your website? Maybe Growth-Driven Design is the answer. Read our Introduction to Growth-Driven Design today to understand how our data-driven methodology drives revenue directly from your website.