Web Copywriting
How to Write a Homepage That Explains Your Business in Five Seconds
Most homepages fail the same test: a stranger cannot say what the company does after five seconds. Here is the structure that fixes it.
Show your homepage to someone who has never heard of your company, take it away after five seconds, and ask them what you do. Most owners are surprised by the answer, and the surprise is the useful part.
The Five-Second Test
A visitor arriving cold is answering one question: is this for me? They answer it from the headline, the sub-line and whatever is visible without scrolling. Everything else on the page only matters if those three things pass.
The failure is almost never that the page is unattractive. It is that the top of the page describes an aspiration — transforming, empowering, partnering — instead of a service. Aspirations do not identify a business; they could belong to anyone.
The Six Blocks a Homepage Needs
- A headline that names the service and the buyer. Plain and specific. If a competitor could paste it on their own site unchanged, rewrite it.
- A sub-line that adds the qualifier. Scale, speciality, geography, price bracket — whatever narrows it to the right people and warns off the wrong ones.
- One primary action. Not four. A second competing button reliably reduces clicks on the first.
- Proof, high up. Named clients, real numbers, a specific result. Unattributed praise is treated as decoration and skipped.
- The routing block. Your services, named, one line each, linked. This is what the homepage is actually for.
- A closing action for the people who scrolled. They read the whole page; do not make them scroll back up.
Everything above is roughly 400 to 700 words. A homepage that runs much past that is usually doing a service page's job on top of its own, and doing both worse.
The Headline Is Most of the Job
It is the one line everybody reads, and it is where the aspiration language concentrates. The fix is mechanical: write the sentence you would say out loud if someone asked what your company does at a party, then remove the hedging.
- Too vague: "Digital solutions for modern businesses." This describes several thousand companies.
- Too clever: "We make words work harder." The reader has to decode it, and they will not.
- Too internal: "Welcome to our website." Nobody has ever needed this sentence.
- About right: "Website copy for B2B service firms — written by an in-house team, delivered in two business days." Anybody can tell in one read whether it is for them.
What to Cut
The mission statement, the founding story and the paragraph about the industry's changing landscape. All three are things owners want on the homepage and no visitor has ever wanted to read there. The about page is the right home for the first two, and nowhere is the right home for the third.
Also cut the carousel. It moves before people finish the first slide, and every measurement anyone has published on them says the same thing: almost all clicks go to slide one, so the other slides are just a slower way of showing nothing.
A specific warning about hero images of laptops, handshakes and abstract gradients: they occupy the most valuable area of the page and communicate nothing. If the image cannot be captioned with a fact about your business, that space would work harder as words.
Before You Publish
- The stranger test: someone outside your industry reads it for five seconds and can name what you sell.
- The substitution test: paste a competitor's name over yours. If it still reads true, you have not said anything yet.
- The scroll test: the primary action is visible without scrolling on a phone, which is where most of the traffic is.
- The routing test: every service you offer is reachable in one click from the homepage.
On length, the ranges in our page-by-page word count guide apply here too. If you would rather not do the rewrite yourself, homepage copy is included in our website copywriting service.
Questions
Questions about this article
Still unsure about something? Talk to a specialist — no script, no sales pitch.
What you do, for whom, in plain words. A headline that could sit on a competitor's site is not doing anything. Specificity beats cleverness every time — the visitor is deciding whether to stay, not admiring the writing.
List them, do not sell them. The homepage routes people to the page that closes; a paragraph on each service crowds out the routing and shortens nothing. Names, one line each, links.
It will rank for your brand name, and that is mostly what it should do. Service pages rank for service queries. Trying to make the homepage rank for everything usually produces a page that converts nobody and ranks for nothing.