What to put on your homepage so people get in touch

Someone taps through to your homepage from a search or a recommendation. They’re on a phone, probably standing somewhere, and within a few seconds they decide whether you’re what they were looking for. If the top of the page is a slogan and a stock photo, they go back and try the next result.

Most small business homepages have the right information somewhere. The problem is the order. The phone number sits in the footer while the first thing anyone reads is “Welcome to our website”. Below is what should go at the top, what can follow, and what to cut.

A headline that says what you do and where

The biggest words on the page should tell a stranger what you do and where you do it. Nothing clever. If a visitor can’t repeat it back after one glance, rewrite it.

Take a made-up example: a heating engineer in Dereham.

• Before: “Quality you can trust since 1998”
• After: “Boiler servicing and repairs in Dereham and mid Norfolk”

Or a made-up landscaper:

• Before: “Transforming outdoor spaces”
• After: “Patios, fencing and garden clearance across Norwich”

The “after” versions are duller to read and far more useful. They match what people type into Google, and they tell the visitor in one line whether you cover their job and their village. “Since 1998” is worth keeping, lower down, as a reason to trust you.

One main action, visible without scrolling

Decide the one thing you most want a visitor to do. A plumber probably wants a phone call, while a salon may want people booking online. Pick one and put it as a button right under the headline.

Check it on your own phone. Load the homepage and, without scrolling, see whether you could get in touch from what’s on the screen. Google also uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking, so the phone view is the version that counts in more ways than one. On a phone, a phone number should be a link that dials when tapped.

A second, quieter option is fine (an email address next to the call button, say), but keep the call button the obvious one.

Proof that you’re real

Once someone knows what you do, the next question is whether you’re any good. Show them:

• Real photos of your work, your van, your premises or your team. Phone photos taken in good light beat polished stock images every time.
• Reviews, ideally a few short ones with first names and towns, plus a link to your Google reviews so people can read them in full.
• Accreditations that apply to your trade, such as Gas Safe registration or membership of a trade body, shown as plain text or the official logo you’re allowed to use.

Keep this near the top. A visitor who has to hunt for proof assumes there isn’t any. Stop looking like a template goes into why real photos carry so much weight.

The things people check before they call

A few facts decide whether someone bothers getting in touch. Put them on the homepage, briefly, even if they’re covered in detail elsewhere:

• A price, or at least a starting price, for your most common job
• The area you cover, by town names people recognise
• Your opening hours, or when you answer the phone
• How soon you can usually start or visit

People who can’t find a price often assume it’s too high. A starting price filters out the wrong enquiries and reassures the right ones.

Plain words over slogans

Write the way you’d describe the business to someone at the school gate: “We fix boilers and fit new ones.” A line like “Delivering heating excellence” tells nobody anything, and nobody searches for it.

Short sentences help on a small screen. So do headings that say what’s in the section beneath them, like “Prices” or “Areas we cover”, rather than headings that try to be catchy.

What to leave off

Some things are on a lot of homepages because they used to be fashionable, not because they help:

• Sliders and carousels. The first slide is often the only one anyone sees, and the extra images slow the page down.
• A welcome paragraph. “Welcome to our website, we are a family business…” spends the most valuable space on the page saying nothing.
• Stock photos of handshakes, smiling call centre staff or a generic city skyline. People recognise them, and they make you look like everyone else.
• Autoplaying video with sound.
• A news section last updated in 2021.

Every one of these adds weight, and a slow site costs you customers explains what that weight does to the number of people who stay.

If your current homepage fails a few of these, the website redesign checklist will help you decide whether to fix it or start again. Or tell us about your business and we’ll suggest a headline for it.