What Should I Include on My Business Homepage?
It's the page that decides whether someone stays or leaves in five seconds. Here's what to include, in the order a visitor reads it.
The homepage is the whole site in one page
Your homepage does a disproportionate amount of the work. It's the page most visitors land on, the page Google weighs most heavily, and the page that decides whether someone stays or leaves in about five seconds. So what goes on it isn't a design question first — it's a "what does a stranger need to know to trust me" question.
Here's what a small business homepage should include, in the order a visitor needs to read it.
First: what you do, in one sentence
The top of your homepage should answer "what do you do?" before the visitor has to scroll. Not a tagline, not a mission statement — a plain sentence. "Plumbing repairs and hot water across Brisbane's south." If a stranger can't tell what you do in two seconds, they leave. This is the single most common homepage failure, and it's the easiest to fix.
Second: where you do it
Right after what, the where. Your service area, in plain words. "Brisbane's south side — from Coorparoo to Beenleigh." The most common reason a visitor leaves a homepage isn't price or design; it's "I'm not sure they come to my suburb". Putting your area up front removes that doubt immediately.
Third: proof you're real
A few real reviews, a couple of recent jobs, the logos of anyone you've worked with. This is the part that turns a stranger into an enquiry, and it's the part most homepages under-invest in. People don't buy from sites; they buy from people they trust, and trust comes from evidence. Stock photos and vague claims do the opposite.
Fourth: the main services, briefly
Not every service — the three or four things you actually want to be hired for. Each with a sentence and a link to a page that goes deeper. The homepage isn't the place to list everything; it's the place to make the big things findable and let the visitor go deeper if they want.
Fifth: an obvious way to contact you
Phone, email, a form — and visible without scrolling to the bottom. If someone has to hunt for how to reach you, a chunk of them won't. Make it easy and you'll get more enquiries from the same traffic. (We wrote the broader version of this — turning visitors into enquiries — here: how to get more leads from your website.)
What to leave off
Big sliders that take forever to load and nobody reads. Walls of text. Stock photos of handshakes. A giant "about us" essay — that belongs on the about page. Anything that exists because a template had it, rather than because a visitor needs it. Every element that doesn't serve the five-second "what, where, how to reach me" test is in the way.
The fastest way to see yours
Reading about it only gets you so far. The quickest way to know what your homepage should say is to see a real version built for your business — pick a style below, tell us about what you do, and we'll mock up your homepage for free. No payment, no obligation. You'll know within a minute whether it says what you need it to.