Your website’s homepage serves as an introduction to your brand and a set of navigational instructions designed to help new and existing customers navigate your business to find what they need.
How to Design an Effective Homepage
According to expert analysis, the best e-commerce sites can grab user attention in under 10 seconds. From a design standpoint, you should make navigation flow clear so that visitors can quickly choose the best path (and for your business), which means balancing white space, intuitive navigation, and intentional design elements.
Adding to this urgency is a psychological phenomenon known as “decision avoidance,” which is the tendency of humans to avoid making a decision that takes a long time to arrive at.
On the homepage, decision avoidance means “bouncing” by leaving the page or clicking the back button. To prevent this, the primary task of your homepage should be to convince potential customers to stay. Remember user experience.
While it’s easy to get caught up in colors and font choices, it’s important to remember the purpose of your homepage: to persuade people to browse your products and ultimately buy. The easiest way to do that is to create a user experience that is easy, intuitive, and straightforward.
If you’re pondering what makes for a great user experience for the best site designs and homepages, here are some questions that can guide you: How easy is it for users to get from the homepage to your online store? What do you want the visitor to do? (Such as purchase, sign up for the email list, etc.) How simple is it for them to do that? How many steps are required to complete your goal? How much information do they need to move to the next step? Can you eliminate any steps?
Sometimes visitors land on the homepage knowing what they want, and other times they don’t. You should design your homepage with both scenarios in mind, ensuring that your decisions align with your main objectives.
Choosing the Right Fonts and Color Scheme
While user experience is paramount, you can also customize your site’s appearance and choose the fonts and color scheme for your homepage. Fonts should match your existing branding to create a consistent visual aesthetic that enhances brand recognition. The same applies to your color scheme.
You may find in some cases that your font is hard to read. It’s important to design your homepage for the user, so it’s acceptable to adapt here. You might consider using your brand font for design elements like banners and footer images while continuing to use a more general font for the rest of the text.
Regarding colors, you should ensure to maintain a clean design while adhering to your brand. If your colors are too harsh to view on screen for long, use white space to break them up. You can use your brand colors for call-to-action buttons, borders, links, and other design elements on your homepage.
Although the vintage clothing brand Peppy Debs has a bright, bold branding, it uses a clean homepage design, making navigation easy. Instead of using the font from its logo, the brand opts for something simpler and more accessible. It employs its color palette in design elements like buttons and font colors.
Using Engaging Images
Decision avoidance applies to all elements on the homepage. Understanding the limits of user attention helps you focus on what matters most when designing your homepage.
Whether
If you are promoting a product or a range of products or trying to attract potential customers, the goal of your visual images is to grab the user’s attention immediately upon arriving at your site.
Here are some ways to incorporate images into your homepage design:
Image with Text Overlay
This style combines a strong single image above the fold with direct text and a call-to-action. It works best for merchants who want to highlight a specific offer above the fold, such as a limited-time discount, a key product, or a seasonal collection.
Slide Shows
You may choose to include a slideshow, with each slide announcing a specific offer, a collection of products, or a high-quality image of a product.
Store owners who sell a wide range of products across multiple categories often select this approach when there are specific collections or pages they want to promote to visitors.
Slides should be arranged based on priority, with the high-priority slide leading. It’s best to limit it to about three slides as users will not look at one slide for long before moving on to the next step.
Video
Some brands benefit from a visual story on the homepage. For some products, particularly innovative or complex ones, it may be vital to illustrate how to use the product before visitors can engage with it.
Consider the homepage of Bottle Cutting Inc. as an example. Many visitors likely do not know they need the product at this moment, so the homepage creates excitement around it through an explanatory video – a natural first step in the conversion process.
Since images have an immediate and significant impact, it’s important to ensure they are high quality and accurately represent your brand.
If you are not a photographer, you can use the image picker tool in the Shopify template editor to choose from our collection of free images.
Animation
Animation adds visual interest and interactivity to your homepage design. You can use animated graphics or GIFs that showcase real images and videos.
Ocean Park Swimwear features animation on their homepage in the form of a GIF. The GIF showcases several different video clips displaying the swimwear in action. Since it targets active women who want to wear swimwear while participating in water sports, the videos demonstrate the products in these scenarios.
This other animated image complements the other product images, texts, and design elements on the brand’s homepage.
Mobile-Friendly Homepage Design
The increase in web traffic on mobile devices has continued to grow over the past few years, accounting for more than half of total global traffic. Since the bulk of your traffic is likely to come from mobile sources, every decision you make regarding homepage design should consider optimization for mobile.
Simplifying the homepage to guide mobile users toward a specific set of actions becomes more critical for mobile users. See how the skincare brand Blendily redefines its value proposition and encourages mobile users to explore its products with an easy-to-see black shopping button in the example below.
If you are a Shopify store owner, elements of any template in the Shopify template store will adapt according to screen size. However, remember that images that look great on a wide desktop screen may be cropped or cut off in unusual ways on a mobile screen. It can be challenging to find call-to-actions on mobile or present them in a way that makes it more likely visitors will click away.
You can
Preview your homepage design effortlessly across different devices in the Shopify theme editor using the toggle options at the top of the preview. The content above the fold inspires action.
Now you need to understand the role of the most valuable real estate on your website. When web designers refer to a specific area on the homepage as “above the fold,” they are talking about what visitors see before they decide to scroll – just like your front door.
When considering what is above the fold and how it aligns with the rest of the homepage, focus on the actions you want the visitor to take when they first land on your site, the information they need first, and how you can help them make their decision.
Most of the best e-commerce site designs use headers that combine attention-grabbing titles and compelling subtitles, along with eye-catching images above the fold to keep new visitors on the site and introduce them to the brand.
However, there are many other ways you can capture customer interest from the start, such as displaying a promotional banner above the navigation menu to announce a special offer or free shipping.
Clear Navigation Menu Design
The strength of navigation lies in its simplicity. This may seem contradictory when you want to accommodate different types of visitors, but it makes sense when you consider how quickly people move from page to page on the web.
Your top navigation menu should be as simple as possible, focusing on the paths that matter to most visitors. Andy Crestodina, strategic director at Orbit Media Studios, recommends not placing more than seven navigation links on your homepage.
Humans use a method of organizational memory called “chunking,” where information is divided into smaller mental units called “chunks.”
The fewer the chunks, the easier it is to remember. In an influential research paper published in 1956, Professor George Miller concluded that our short-term memory is typically capable of holding about seven items at one time.
Websites with many navigation options can feel cluttered and confusing, increasing the likelihood that visitors will abandon them or take the wrong path. It’s a good idea to prioritize your navigation links from left to right with the most important pages on the left.
If you have many products and collections, focus on the main collections at the top level of your navigation menu and use a “mega menu” or dropdown menu to create sub-navigation.
Sub-navigation is an excellent way to organize your products and pages for easy exploration without overwhelming customers with a large number of options from the start.
Some sites also include links in the top navigation menu to an “About Us” page, a “Contact Us” page, or a “FAQ” page, as those pages support their main goals.
However, if you find that visitors are not converting on these pages, it’s likely that these links are taking them away from the conversion path. If that’s the case, it’s better to move these links to the footer instead.
Direct Call to Action
Think of a call to action as a signpost on the highway; it should be short and hard to miss, directing the right drivers on the road they should take.
Calls to action and what they are linked to should align with the next steps the customer can take toward the main goals of your homepage. This may mean linking them to your latest product collection or enticing users to watch an explainer video to learn more.
Users should instantly understand where to click, as the call to action button should stand out from the surrounding design. The longer a user takes to find the call to action button, the more likely they are to become confused or click away.
Cart
Accessible Shopping
The shopping cart is a core component of the homepage for most e-commerce sites.
Part of making navigation easy for your customers is ensuring that the shopping cart is easy to find. A “sticky” shopping cart (also known as a “slide” cart), available in some Shopify templates, is a cart that appears and is accessible on-screen throughout the browsing experience, typically in the top right corner.
Even better, you can display the number of items currently in the customer’s shopping cart as well. A prominent and eye-catching notification next to the cart indicates the number of items currently added, reminding customers that the purchase is still in progress and encouraging them to complete the checkout process.
In the lower section: Other homepage elements to consider
The elements found below the fold (i.e., after scrolling) are not necessarily less important – they often enhance and expand upon the information you’ve already provided, offer alternative paths to the same conversion goal, and make other pages available to customers who need them.
Here is a brief list of elements you may consider including as part of your homepage or footer design, depending on how important they are to your goals:
Blogs, Videos, and Other Content
Blog content and videos can be great for SEO, but content above the fold has the potential to distract customers and draw them away from your products. Generally, you want content to lead users to your products, not the other way around. You might place links to your content below the fold or even in the footer, especially if content is not a core part of your business, allowing users who choose to explore your site to find it.
If you want to promote your content, you can add a link in the top navigation menu, but it’s better to do so on social media, via email, and through third-party sites so it can drive external traffic to your own site.
Social Proof: Customer Reviews, Endorsements, and Press
Social proof is an endorsement for your brand that leverages existing trust from customers/expert to gain the confidence of new visitors. This can include mentions in the press, reviews, social media posts, Instagram showcases, or endorsements from influencers or experts.
If you have compelling social proof to leverage, the homepage can be a good place for it. Lower-priority products and add-ons
Older products and add-on items might be worth shifting down your homepage. You want to start with your primary products or draw attention to your latest product lines, for example.
Cheaper products that complement main products work best as impulse buys used as upsell offers at checkout, but they can also be included on the homepage, below the fold, to inform visitors about them if you sell a product that requires spare parts or fillers.
For example, LIV focuses on watches but advertises featured add-on products like bands at the bottom of its homepage.
Lower-Priority Pages
The pages you consider lower priority may vary depending on your business model. Generally, pages like Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Return Policy work best in the footer. Since links to these pages are often saved in the footer, many visitors will look for them there if they need access.
Other pages like “About Us,” contact information, store locations, or order tracking pages can also be added to the footer. However, if these pages help potential customers purchase from you or help you achieve another primary goal, you might consider prioritizing them in the top navigation menu or even in the homepage layout.
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For example, a merchant selling a subscription service may be able to significantly reduce support tickets by adding a prominent FAQ link in the top navigation of the homepage.
When trying to determine if a page is of low priority, ask yourself how beneficial it would be if you directed visitors to that page immediately and whether it distracts them from the intended results or attracts them to it.
10 Best Examples of Homepage Design
Here are some good examples of homepage design:
PopSockets
PopSockets’ homepage blends bold and big design trends with conversion rate optimization. Stunning product images capture the target audience’s attention, while there are multiple calls to action throughout the page.
Benoa Swim
The sustainable swimwear brand Benoa Swim successfully combines good homepage design with user-friendliness and simple functionality. The homepage features a simple navigation bar and high-quality, large product images.
Common Heir
Common Heir uses good homepage design to sell skincare products online. The homepage includes essential elements such as a simple navigation bar and contrasting colors that make it easy to read, with call-to-action buttons throughout the page.
GRAV
GRAV appears simple and fun. Although the brand colors are black and white, GRAV opts for bright background colors and bright design elements to bring its homepage to life.
Hunterhue
Hunterhue is an art and jewelry brand selling unique, handcrafted pieces. The homepage design is simple and straightforward, allowing the products and art to take center stage.
Rowan
The dog care brand Rowan uses a beautiful, clean homepage design to attract online shoppers. The homepage features bright colors and cute images to draw in brand affinity.
La Banasta
La Banasta sells eco-friendly cleaning products and household goods through its website. The homepage features beautiful product imagery, call-to-action buttons, and an easy-to-navigate main menu.
Ora Organic
The supplement brand Ora Organic showcases a clean, beautiful homepage design that splits users into two target groups: those wanting to shop for products independently and those seeking shopping guidance. Thus, they guide users to browse all items or take a quiz to help them identify the best product for them.
Dirty Labs
Dirty Labs is an eco-friendly laundry detergent brand that uses clean design for its website. The white, beige, and soft color palette gives a friendly and playful impression – alongside clear pathways for site navigation.
BioLite Energy
BioLite Energy sells portable and sustainable cooking and lighting devices. The homepage highlights beautiful product images and clear calls to action.
Improving Homepage Design Over Time
As you now know, there is no one way to design your homepage. Several factors such as user demographics, branding, the number of products, marketing channels, and others affect user behavior in various ways.
That’s why it’s always important to consider your homepage a work in progress, using the traffic and sales it generates to measure the impact of your homepage and make adjustments over time.
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