What to Include on a Website Homepage

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

A website home page has one job: tell a stranger what you do, who it is for, and what to do next. Most homepages fail at the first of those three, and no amount of design fixes a page whose headline says ‘Welcome to our website’. This page sets out the eight elements a homepage needs, the order they should appear in — which matches the order a visitor asks questions — what to cut, how the weighting changes by business type, and the five-second test that tells you whether yours works.

The eight elements, in order

Answer first: headline, subheadline, proof, problem, process, price or path to price, primary action, and contact. In that sequence, because a visitor who does not get an answer to question one never reaches question four.

1. The headline: what you do and for whom

One sentence, in plain language, naming what you do and who it is for. This single element does more work than the rest of the page combined, and it is the element most often wasted on a slogan. ‘Bookkeeping for independent restaurants in New Jersey’ outperforms ‘Financial clarity, delivered’ every time, because the first tells a stranger whether to keep reading.

2. The subheadline: how, or what is different

One more sentence adding the mechanism or the differentiator. If the headline says what and for whom, the subheadline says how or why you. Two sentences, together, should let a visitor decide whether they are in the right place.

3. Proof, immediately

Numbers, named customer types, years operating, volume handled, or a specific result. Proof placed immediately after the headline converts far better than proof buried three sections down, because the visitor’s second question is always some version of ‘why should I believe you’.

4. The problem, in the visitor’s language

State the problem you solve the way your customer would describe it, not the way your industry does. This is where most homepages switch into internal vocabulary and lose the reader, and it is the section that most benefits from being written from a recording of an actual customer call.

5. How it works, in three steps

Three steps. Not five, and not a paragraph. The purpose is to remove uncertainty about what happens if someone engages, and uncertainty is a larger obstacle than price for most services.

6. Cost, or the path to it

Either state pricing or state clearly how someone finds it out. Hiding it entirely costs you the visitors who would have been a good fit and were unwilling to fill in a form to discover they were not. If you genuinely cannot publish prices, publish ranges or the factors that determine them.

7. One primary call to action, repeated

One. Repeated at the top, in the middle and at the bottom, with the same wording. Five equally weighted actions produce no action at all, because choosing between them is work and the visitor did not come to do work.

8. Contact details, visible early

A tappable phone number and an obvious route to a form or email. For a local service business this is not an eighth element — it is closer to a second one, and it should be visible without scrolling.

What to cut from a website homepage

Answer first: the slider, the welcome message, stock photography of people who do not work for you, the mission statement, unfamiliar award badges, and internal jargon. All six occupy the space where the eight elements should be.

Where attention actually goes

Answer first: roughly two thirds of visitor attention lands on the headline, the first visual and the primary call to action. Most redesign effort goes into the parts of the page a minority of visitors ever reach.

The practical implication: before commissioning a redesign, rewrite the headline and move the primary action above the fold. Those two changes cost an afternoon and frequently produce more improvement than a full rebuild, which is worth knowing before spending on the rebuild.

Home page, front page, landing page: the terms people use

Answer first: home page and front page mean the same thing — the entry point of a website. A landing page is a different object built for a single campaign and a single action, and confusing the two produces a home page that tries to convert one audience while ignoring everyone else.

What are home pages for, exactly

A home page exists to orient a stranger and route them. It is the only page on a website written for somebody who may know nothing about you, which is why the contents of a website’s home page differ so much from the contents of every other page on it.

Web page contents versus home page contents

Answer first: web page content generally serves a visitor who arrived with a specific intent, whereas home page content serves one who has not yet formed one. That difference explains the sequence: the home page answers ‘what is this and is it for me’ first, and the rest of the site answers ‘tell me more about the thing I already want’.

Good website homepage examples: how to study them without copying

Answer first: look at two home pages in your sector, one you find clear and one you find confusing, and note four things about each — the headline, the first piece of proof, the number of calls to action, and how long it took you to understand what the business does. Copy the sequence and the discipline, never the layout.

1. Find two competitors’ web page home page examples — one clear, one not.
2. Read only the headline on each. Does it say what and for whom?
3. Note the first proof point and whether it is checkable.
4. Count the calls to action above the fold.
5. Time how long before you understood the business.
6. Write down what the clear one did that the other did not. That list is your brief.

The contents of a website: what sits beyond the home page

Answer first: the contents of a website for most small businesses come to five pages — home, services, about, proof and contact — with a page per service you want more of. The contents for a website beyond that should each earn their place by answering a question somebody actually searches.

How the weighting changes by business type

Answer first: the eight elements are constant; their relative importance is not. Contact prominence dominates for local services, pricing visibility for ecommerce, and proof for professional services.

Home page examples and how the same structure adapts

Answer first: the eight elements do not change between businesses; what changes is which one leads and how much space each gets. Below are six illustrative home page examples showing the same sequence applied differently. These are constructed examples rather than real websites.

What the six share: a headline naming what and for whom, and one primary action. What differs is the second element. Copy that discipline rather than any particular layout.

A worked home page of a website, section by section

Answer first: take the bookkeeper above. The home page of a website like that runs headline, proof, problem, process, price range, services summary, two FAQs, footer with contact — eight sections, roughly 700 words, and the entire thing answers the visitor’s questions in the order they arrive.

Why front page content should not be the longest page on the site

Answer first: because front page content is read by people who have not yet decided whether to care. Depth belongs where intent is higher. A home page that runs to three thousand words is almost always holding content that belongs on service pages, where it would also rank for its own terms.

The five-second test

Answer first: show your homepage to somebody who does not know your business for five seconds, then ask what you do and who it is for. If they cannot answer both, the headline is the problem and it is the cheapest thing on the page to fix.

1. Find someone outside your industry. Your team already knows the answer and cannot un-know it.
2. Show the homepage on a phone, not a desktop monitor.
3. Five seconds, then take it away.
4. Ask: what does this business do, and who is it for?
5. Ask: what would you do next on that page?
6. Record what they said verbatim before you interpret it or explain anything.

Two or three people is enough to know. If all of them hesitate on the same question, that is the section to rewrite, and rewriting is almost always cheaper and faster than redesigning.

Homepage content versus the rest of the site

Answer first: the homepage introduces and routes; it does not have to explain everything. The commonest homepage failure after a vague headline is trying to fit the entire website onto one page.

The conclusion: a homepage is a routing document with a persuasive top. If a section is there to inform rather than to route or persuade, it probably belongs on its own page where somebody who wants it can find it.

Planning website content page by page

Answer first: decide the contents of website pages before writing any of them, because the home page’s job depends entirely on what else exists to route to. Website page content planned page by page produces a site where nothing is duplicated and nothing is missing.

A website content page plan that takes an hour

1. List every service you want more of. Each gets its own page. That is the spine of the site.
2. List the questions customers ask before buying. Each becomes a page or an FAQ entry.
3. Decide what proof exists and where it lives — one proof page, or proof distributed across service pages.
4. Write the one-line purpose of each page next to it. If two pages have the same purpose, merge them.
5. Only then write the home page, because now you know what it is routing to.
6. Check the contents for website completeness: can a visitor answer what, who, how, how much and what next without leaving the site?

What goes wrong when the home page is written first

Answer first: it absorbs content that belongs on service pages, because there is nowhere else to put it yet. The result is a long home page and thin service pages — the opposite of what search and buyers both reward, since service pages are where high-intent searches actually land.

Example home pages content checklist

• Headline naming what and for whom.
• Subheadline naming how or what differs.
• Proof that is specific and checkable.
• Problem in the customer’s language.
• Process in three steps.
• Price or the route to it.
• One primary action, repeated.
• Contact, visible early and again in the footer.

The technical side of a homepage

Answer first: speed on mobile data, readable contrast, one H1 with real heading structure, descriptive alt text, a title tag that says what you do, and Organization schema at minimum. None of these are visible to a visitor and all of them affect whether the visitor arrives.

• Speed matters most on mobile data, which is where the page is actually seen. Test on a phone away from office wifi, not in a browser tab on a fast connection.
• One H1, containing what you do. Real H2s for sections rather than styled paragraphs.
• Descriptive alt text on every meaningful image, written for a person rather than stuffed with keywords.
• A title tag that says what you do, not just your business name. Your name means nothing to somebody who has not heard of you.
• Organization schema at minimum, plus LocalBusiness if you serve a physical area.
• Readable contrast on every text pairing, checked rather than assumed.

More on the build side in website design and development, when a redesign is justified and keeping it working afterwards.

Testing and improving an existing homepage

Answer first: change the headline, move the primary action above the fold, and add one specific proof point. Measure for four weeks before changing anything else, because simultaneous changes make the result unreadable.

1. Record the baseline. Inquiries per week, bounce rate on the home page, and time to first interaction.
2. Change one thing. The headline first, because it is the highest-impact and cheapest.
3. Wait four weeks or until you have enough traffic to see a difference. For low-traffic sites this may be longer, and that is worth accepting rather than guessing.
4. Then change the next thing. Primary action position, then proof, then speed.
5. Keep a change log with dates, so a future change can be attributed correctly.

A homepage outline you can work from

Above the fold
Headline: what you do, for whom.
Subheadline: how, or what is different.
Primary call to action.
Phone number, if you take calls.

Section one — proof
Numbers, named customer types, or a specific result.

Section two — the problem
In the customer’s words. Two or three sentences.

Section three — how it works
Three steps. Same call to action beneath.

Section four — what it costs
Pricing, a range, or how to find out.

Section five — services or products
A summary of each, each linking to its own page.

Section six — objection handling
Two or three FAQs answering what stops people.

Footer
Contact details, service area, primary call to action again.

Adapt the weighting to your business type using the table above, but keep the sequence. The order is the part that matters most, because it is the order a stranger’s questions actually arrive in.

The home page of a website, the main page, and the front page mean the same thing

The home page of a web site is the page a visitor reaches at the bare domain, and it goes by several names that all describe the same thing: the main page of a website, the web front page, the landing page in loose usage, and the index. What matters is not the vocabulary but the job. The main page website visitors arrive at has to answer three questions in about five seconds — what this is, who it is for, and what to do next — and everything else on it is subordinate. Inside pages, meaning every page that is not the home page, can afford to be slower and deeper because the visitor arrived with more context.

Website homepage ideas that survive contact with real visitors

Useful web home page ideas are structural rather than decorative. Lead with a plain sentence stating what you do and for whom, not a slogan. Put one primary action in the header and repeat it at the foot. Show proof early — named clients, numbers, or a specific result — because skepticism arrives before interest. Give each major audience its own clearly labeled route rather than trying to speak to all of them at once. And leave out the carousel: it occupies the most valuable region of the page and moves before anything can be read. What to put on a website homepage is, in the end, the shortest path from arrival to the next step.

Examples of website content, and what content in website design actually covers

An example of website content is easiest to grasp as a list of what has to exist rather than as a sample to copy: the proposition, the proof, the offer, the objection handling, the pricing position, and the contact route. Content in website design is often treated as the thing poured in at the end, which is why so many sites launch with placeholder text replaced badly. A content of a website sample worth studying is one from your own sector where you can see all six of those elements present and identify where each sits — that tells you more than any template.

How to make a website your browser homepage

A separate question that shares the words: how to make a website as homepage refers to your own browser’s start page rather than to site design. In Chrome it is Settings, then Appearance, then Show home button with the address entered; on startup behavior is set under On startup. Firefox and Safari have equivalent settings under Home and General respectively. If you arrived here looking for how to make a web page my homepage in that sense, that is the whole answer — the rest of this page is about what belongs on a home page you own.

What goes on the home page of any website, and what does not

Content for homepage briefs go wrong in a predictable way: everyone internally wants their section represented, and the result is a home page on website that says everything and communicates nothing.

The contents of home page space should answer three questions in the first screen: what is this, who is it for, and what do I do next. Everything else on the website main page is supporting material. If a visitor cannot answer all three without scrolling, no amount of content below fixes it.

What home page real estate should not carry: a mission statement, a company history, a carousel nobody waits through, or a welcome message. Those are the four most common occupants of the most valuable space on any site, and none of them helps a visitor decide anything.

The home page of any website is also rarely the entry point people assume. Most visitors arrive on a deeper page from search, so the homepage does more work as an orientation and credibility surface for people who navigate back to it than as a front door. Content of homepage decisions read differently once you check where entrances actually happen.

A workable order for the content

What it is and who for; proof it works; the specific next step; then the supporting detail in whatever order suits your business. Everything competing for position above that is usually an internal request rather than a visitor need.

The three key elements of a homepage

What a first-time visitor needs before anything else.

Three key elements decide whether a homepage works, and they answer three questions a visitor asks in the first few seconds. What is this: a plain statement of what the business does, in the customer’s words rather than the industry’s. Is it for me: enough specificity about who it serves that the right visitor recognizes themselves. What do I do next: one obvious primary action, repeated as the page progresses.

Everything else on a homepage — the proof, the range, the story, the team — supports those three and should not displace them. The most common defect is a hero section that describes the company’s ambition rather than its offer, which fails the first question and therefore the other two.

Frequently asked questions