The age old question, how do you keep a user engaged in your content and increase their amount of time on your site. A main focus of this is the design and appeal to the eye of your homepage. So what is the key to keep your user engaged based on their first impressions of your website?

Your Homepage is a Conversion Path Welcome Mat

Your homepage should have the most visits and the lowest time spent on the page. It should also have the highest click through rate – or lowest bounce rate. There are Four Cs in a Conversion, if you pay attention to them, your homepage will be successful.

The Four C’s

Your homepage probably gets more traffic than any other page in your site. All those visitors might be doctors, lawyers, designers, moms or dads, skateboarders, etc. No matter who they are, they all fall into one of four types of people:

The Four C’s:

1. Confused People – Has no idea why they are on your website or what you do.
2. Curious People – Heard about your site or product and is wondering if you can help them.
3. Convinced People – Found what they needed to find on your website and are taking action.
4. Continuing People – You have something they need, all the time, and they like it.

Design for Conversion

The job of your home page is to move the visitors from Confused to Continuing without getting in the way of one or the other. When they show up, they will likely be Confused or (hopefully) Curious about what your site has to offer. Before they leave, they should become Convinced that your website or product is for them. Even better, if you’ve caught on to the Internet of late, you have a Subscription Model or a SaaS (Software as a Service) Product that visitors can latch on to.

The real answer to this questions is, What Makes Users Get Off Your Homepage?

Guide them

Getting your user experience right from wire framing will guide your visitor to the site content they need, not have them looking at pages of information they don’t want. This is going to be your biggest cause of drop out of the site.

The easiest way to lose people as they navigate your homepage is over-complexity. These are some questions that you should ask and should always have a “yes” to:

• Can I find what I’m looking for under 30 seconds?
• Does it take over of time to load the page I’m going to?
• When I get to my goal, does it meet my needs?

Provide content that your users want, and make it easy to access!