Home pages play a critical role in a site’s overall success and effectiveness. For that reason it’s very important to get it right. However, most home pages have abandonment rates of 40 – 70%. Abandonment rates are also referred to as bounce rate and is the percentage of people who land on your page and leave the site without clicking further, thus not converting.

A – sliqtools.co.uk

Abandonment Rate Example:

For example, you have 20,000 visitors to your home page and 59% of your visitors abandon your home page. Therefore the number of visitors who abandon your home page in this case  is 11,800.

20,000 x 59% = 11,800

What does this number mean for you and your business? It means that 11,800 visitors left/abandonded your website without going any further. In this example that’s more than half of your visitors. To me it says that there is a problem with your home page and that something needs to be done if you want to increase your conversion rates and sales.

But in order to be able to tackle this problem, you need to know the reasons why your visitors abandon your home page.

Top reasons why visitors abandon your home page:

• after landing on your home page, visitors make a very quick judgment about your site based on the overall look. This takes only several seconds. By the look of your home page they will judge your credibility.
• once your home page passes the initial judgment, your visitors look to see if they are in the right place and for a clear value proposition – why they should buy from you. No clear reason? They will bounce.
• then they will look for a clear call to action – instead of  “Sign up Now” (they have just visited your website and you are asking them to “sign up”, even though they don’t know what they are signing up for) use instead something like “See Plans and Pricing “. Read more about how testing the sign up button on highrise.com home page increased their conversion by 200%.
• not addressing different audience or segmenting on your home page . Segmenting is dividing customers into groups, each with common attributes, e.g. small business, medium business or large business if for example B2B business.

So now as you have learned something, have a look at these two home pages (yes, the B example is a screen shot of their home page). Both of them are in the same industry. Which of them do you think converts better A or B example?

B – simplyinvoice.co.uk

If you need help in order to decrease your home page abandonment rates, then learn about our a/b and multivariate service backed up by our 100% money back guarantee, or if your site looks like example B, then I would like to offer your our website redesign service, with our conversion improvement guarantee.