What your homepage should say in the first ten seconds
Visitors give your homepage a few seconds to tell them they’re in the right place. Most homepages spend them on a slogan. How to test yours with a stranger and rewrite the top in an afternoon.
November 12, 2026Last updated November 12, 2026
“Empowering solutions for a brighter tomorrow.”
A visitor reads that, scrolls a little, sees a photo of people smiling at a laptop and leaves. They came to find out whether you fix roofs, run an after-school program or sell accounting software. Your homepage told them you’re optimistic.
You get about ten seconds
Nielsen Norman Group, which has studied how people use websites for decades, found that users often leave pages in 10 to 20 seconds, and that a page has to make its value clear in the first ten to keep them longer. That’s enough time to read one headline and one sentence. Most homepages spend it on a slogan.
The same research group put the homepage’s job in one line back in 2001. It has to show, “in one short glance”, where people are, what you do and what they can do on your site. The group notes that those guidelines have held up well, and they still describe the problem we see most often.
The visitor’s question is always the same
Whoever lands on your homepage is asking some version of: is this the thing I’m looking for? The answer should be the first thing they read, in words they’d use themselves. “We repair and replace roofs for homes and small businesses” will never win an award. It will win the roof.
Think about who actually arrives. A woman whose ceiling started dripping during last night’s storm, typing on her phone with one hand while the other holds a mixing bowl under the leak. She has opened four roofing sites in four tabs. She skips anything that sounds like a mission statement. She wants to know, in order, whether you fix leaks, whether you work near her and how to reach someone today.
Every homepage has a version of her. For a clinic it’s someone with a sore tooth and a lunch break. For a nonprofit it’s a parent trying to figure out if the program is free. All of them are reading on the move, usually on a phone.
Cover your logo and ask a stranger
Try this test: cover your logo and show your homepage to someone who’s never heard of you. Ask them what you do. If they hesitate, rewrite the headline before you touch anything else.
Pick the stranger carefully. Your team won’t work, because they already know the answer. Your partner won’t work either, because they’ve heard you talk about work at dinner for years. A neighbor, a cousin in another line of work or a friend of a friend is ideal. Show them the top of the page on a phone, for about five seconds, then take it away.
Then ask three short questions. What does this organization do? Who is it for? What would you click first? Write down their answers in their exact words. If they say “I think it’s some kind of consulting thing?”, you’ve learned more than any analytics dashboard will tell you this year.
Their words are also useful material. People describe what you do in plain terms, often better than the team does. Keep their phrasing in a note, because a sentence a customer says out loud often makes a better headline than one written in a meeting.
Why so many homepages say nothing
Nobody sets out to write a vague homepage. It happens in a meeting. The first draft says “We fix roofs.” Someone says it sounds small. Someone else wants to mention the commercial work. A board member asks whether “fix” is a bit informal. Forty minutes later the sentence has been sanded down to something everyone can approve and nobody can picture.
Nielsen Norman Group’s guidelines are blunt about the result: vague or jargon-filled taglines confuse people, and can even make them mistrust the site, especially when it reads like marketing hype. A visitor who can’t tell what you do assumes the worst, which usually means they assume you aren’t for them.
A useful rule for the meeting: the headline should mention something you could photograph. A roof, a classroom, a dental chair, a bowl of soup. If the sentence would fit just as well on a bank’s website, keep working on it.
Then tell them what to do
Once visitors know they’re in the right place, they want the next step: book, call, give, see prices, sign up. Pick the one that matters most and put it right there. One clear button usually beats five polite ones.
The button’s words matter as much as its color. “Get started” and “Learn more” could mean anything. “Book a free inspection” or “See this week’s classes” tells people what happens when they tap. If you’re torn between two actions, ask which one the person with the dripping ceiling needs. Usually it’s the phone number.
Make that number tappable, so it dials when someone touches it. It sounds obvious. Some homepages still show the phone number as part of an image, or as plain text that has to be copied by hand. If you also take messages on WhatsApp, a clear button for that can sit right next to it. We wrote about doing that well in our piece on WhatsApp buttons.
On a phone, that button should be visible without scrolling. We wrote more about that in our piece on websites and phones.
Everything else can wait for the scroll
Your mission, your history, your values and your team all matter to people who’ve already decided you’re worth a closer look. Put them further down or on their own pages. Keep the top of the homepage for the answer and the button.
A simple order works for most organizations. Under the headline, a short line on who you serve and where. Then a few clear paths to your main services or programs. Then proof: reviews, results, logos of people you’ve worked with, a photo of the real team. The story and the values come after, for the visitors who are still reading. Those visitors exist, and they read carefully, because by then they’re deciding.
Take a small tutoring center as an example, a composite of several we’ve seen. Its old homepage opened with a paragraph about believing in every child’s potential. The new one opens with “After-school math and reading tutoring for grades 1 to 8,” the neighborhoods it serves and a button to book a free assessment. The belief in every child is still there, two scrolls down, next to photos of the tutors. Parents who get that far are the ones reading every word.
Things that usually can go: the rotating slider of five messages, the stock photo of a handshake and the welcome paragraph that begins “Welcome to our website.” They’re there now, so they feel necessary. Ask whether a visitor would miss them.
How to fix your homepage in an afternoon
You don’t need a redesign to fix this. Most of the work is a few sentences, and you can draft them yourself before anyone touches the layout. Here is the order we use:
- Write one sentence that says what you do and for whom, using no word you wouldn’t say to a neighbor.
- Add one short line with the detail people check next, such as the area you cover, your hours or whether it’s free.
- Choose the single action most visitors should take, and write a button label that says exactly what happens.
- Run the stranger test again with the new version, with someone new.
If you work with an agency, ask them to show you the homepage headline before they show you any design. A good one will want to agree on the words first, because the layout depends on them. Also ask how your team can change that headline later without a developer, since the right words often get clearer after a few months of real visitors.
If you’d like a fresh pair of eyes on your homepage, book a 30-minute call and we’ll go through it together, the way a first-time visitor would.
