What a local business homepage has to do in five seconds

Every article about homepage design is written by somebody who designs homepages, so the answer is always a design answer: a stronger headline, a clearer hierarchy, a better hero image.

For a local business the homepage's first job is not persuasion. It is disambiguation, and it is answered with facts rather than with messaging.

The four questions

Somebody arriving on your homepage is working through these in order, in a few seconds, and they will leave rather than scroll if any of them is unanswered.

1. 01Is this the right kind of business. Do they do the thing I need, said in the words I would use rather than in the words your industry uses.
2. 02Do they cover me. City or suburb visible without scrolling. This is the one most often missing and the most common reason somebody leaves.
3. 03Are they open, or reachable. A phone number that can be tapped, and hours if you have them.
4. 04Are they real. Something that proves a business rather than a template: a photograph of the actual premises or the actual team, a review count, a licence number.

What goes above the fold

The consensus across the design writing is five elements, and it holds up as long as the local facts are inside them rather than beside them. The title tag has to do the same job in sixty characters before anyone arrives at all.

HEADLINE
  What you do, plainly, with the place.
  "Emergency plumbers across Brisbane's
   northside"
  Not "Excellence in plumbing solutions"

SUBHEAD
  One line that removes a doubt.
  "Same day callouts. $89 callout fee,
   deducted from the job."

ONE BUTTON
  Not four. Whichever action you
  actually want: call, book, or quote.

PHONE NUMBER
  Visible and tappable, next to the
  button rather than in the footer.

PROOF
  Star rating and review count, or a
  licence number, or a photograph of
  the actual van.

That is it. Everything else on the homepage is below the fold and matters less than any one of those five.

The thing nobody mentions

For a lot of local businesses, the homepage is not the landing page. Most arrivals land on a service page, a location page or straight from the map pack, so the homepage is doing less of the work than its redesign budget implies.

People arrive on your service page from a search, or tap the website link on your map listing. They reach the homepage afterwards, and often for a specific reason: to check that the business is real before ringing.

That changes what it needs. A verification visitor is looking for signs of an actual operating business: real photographs, a named person, recent activity, a physical address or a clearly stated service area. Those matter more on a homepage than a persuasive headline, because the person reading it has already been persuaded and is now looking for a reason to doubt you.

Five things to remove

• A slider. Nobody reads slide two, it slows the page down, and it usually means a decision about the headline was avoided.
• Welcome to our website. The most prominent line on the page, spent saying nothing.
• A stock photograph of people in hard hats pointing at a clipboard. Every visitor has seen it and it signals a business with nothing of its own to show.
• Four competing calls to action. Pick the one you actually want and let the others be links.
• A paragraph about your commitment to quality and customer satisfaction. It is true of every business and therefore says nothing about yours.

The test

Open your homepage on your phone, off wifi, and look at it for five seconds. Then look away and write down what a stranger would now know. If it took most of those five seconds to appear at all, that is a speed problem rather than a copy one.

If the list does not include what you do, where you do it and how to reach you, the design is not the problem. The facts are missing, and no amount of hierarchy fixes that.

How the individual service pages should work is part of the on-page essentials. The trust elements worth putting near the top are the ones a customer would check before ringing: a licence number, an insurance line, a guarantee stated in a sentence, and reviews you actually asked for.