Are you suffering from homepage-itus? The symptoms include:
- The belief that visitors always enter your website through the homepage
- You send all of your traffic PPC, SEO, or Ad traffic to the homepage
- Promoting products, content, email newsletters, or promotions only on the homepage
- The belief that the “wow factor” is the most important impression to a customer, so you make your homepage do a flash based song-and-dance
- A disproportionately large amount of your web design budget goes to redesigning it obsessively
The truth is that visitor behaviour has changed drastically. Homepages don’t matter as much as they used too. First-time visitors enter deep into the site courtesy of Google’s more accurate search results. Repeat visitors enter through landing pages from email campaigns or bookmarks to specific pages that interested them. If you take a look at your analytics, I bet you’ll be shocked out how many of your visitors never even pass through the homepage.
Instead of obsessing over the homepage, take a look at other pages that are a required part of your conversion funnel (in other words, buyers must pass through these pages). Look at your product category pages, the product detail pages, shopping cart, and checkout pages. Odds are, there’s some low-hanging fruit there.
Are you treating every page on your site like a homepage, or just one?