Make your ecommerce homepage more effective

“How can this company help me?”

“Why does it exist?”

“What are its values and purpose?”

Your homepage is a hub for this information. This article explains how to make the most of your homepage — and drive more sales.

Goals of a good ecommerce homepage

Establish Trust

Design, color, fonts, and images are the website elements that are most closely tied to trust. One study found that these were rated, by visitors, as more important than product information, price information, policies, and even guarantees/warranties.

When people use the terms “clean” and “professional,” they mean the design excels in:

Visual balance
Use of negative space
Contrast (e.g., text is easily visible against the background)
Organization of information
Use of high-quality, original imagery
Consistency (e.g., style, color, spacing)
Use of typography

Website visitors make credibility judgments based on design, then move on to assess other elements like information quality, brand reputation, and site functionality. Study [PDF]

Use design to establish trust on your homepage. Create high quality content to keep it.

Inform Visitors

What do you offer? Tell your audience more about your products. Have a lot of SKUs? Summarize your range by categorizing products and showing top categories on your homepage.

Usual Wines website homepage screenshot — **What:** Usual Wines says what they sell and hints and how it's different from competitors, right at the top of their homepage.

Bite website homepage categories screenshot — **What (categories):** Bite shows their product range in the first section below the hero. Hovering over the product cards reveals images of people using the products. The founder of Bite even makes a cameo in the example above.

Who are your products for? Use visuals and tone of voice to speak the language of your audience. Colors, photography, and typography all play a huge role in helping visitors emotionally connect with your brand.

Bravo Sierra website homepage screenshot — **Who:** Bravo Sierra sells personal care products. The brand is deeply rooted in the active duty military & veteran community. They make it immediately clear that their audience is highly active and hard-working, just like their products.

Why should your audience care? Clearly state what your products do for customers and what sets them apart from competing products. Do they simplify an everyday task? Help them overcome a challenge? Boost their confidence? This, your unique selling proposition, makes it difficult to compare your products with those of your competitors.

Picnic website homepage screenshot — **Why:** Picnic doesn't lead with their products. Their hero section highlights the value their products provide, then invites visitors to personalize their experience with a quiz.

Navigate visitors to the right place

Create a clear, simple navigation that helps visitors get to product detail pages. Be specific and direct with your calls-to-action. Without knowing where you want them to go, visitors will leave.

Measure your homepage performance

Through-traffic

How much of your homepage traffic is moving deeper into your site?

Keep an eye on sessions that start on your homepage. Do these sessions have a high bounce rate? After landing on your homepage, how many pages do they visit?

Bounce rate will tell you which percentage of visitor sessions only included one page visit. Are visitors sticking around once they land on your homepage?

Pages per session will give you a good idea of how engaging your homepage content is. Make sure to only track the number of pages per session that originated on your homepage.

Scroll Depth

How far down the page are users scrolling? An engaging homepage tells a story. It keeps the audience interested until they’re motivated to click. If traffic isn’t flowing past your homepage, scroll depth is the next place to look for issues.

You can set up scroll depth tracking in Google Tag Manager or see it in a tool like Hotjar.

Heatmaps

Use heatmaps to spot trends that don’t show up in metrics. Are users trying to click on things that aren’t clickable? Are they not clicking at all? Heatmaps will also give you visual context for scroll depth, making it easier to see where audience engagement fades.

Continue to improve your homepage

Keep in mind your customers’ context when they arrive on your homepage.

Do they know they have a need that your product will solve?

Do they know your brand well enough to know you can solve their problem?

Are they returning to purchase more of your products?

These situations should all be handled by your homepage. It’s not the place to appeal to a targeted audience; you should use landing pages for that.

Communicate your what, who, and why. Be clear and direct in your communication. Do all of these, and you’ll create impactful experiences that become lasting memories.

Your homepage is like the lobby of a museum. You can branch off in many directions; each one distinct. The lobby is your starting point—a taste of what you'll see inside. It never contains the full collection.

Getting traffic from your homepage to your product detail pages will drive more conversions.

Experiment with everything.

Test images.

Try different headings and copy.

Introduce a new type of section or redesign existing sections.

Use data to brighten your path to homepage improvement.