How to write a homepage that answers the first question

Somebody lands on your homepage. They have about eight seconds of patience and one question in their head, and that question is almost never "what is the story of this company?"

Most homepages spend those eight seconds on a photograph and a line of words that could belong to any business in any trade. Welcome to our site. Quality service you can trust. Your local experts since 1998. By the time the visitor has scrolled far enough to find out whether you cover their town, half of them have gone.

The four questions, in the order they arrive

Whatever your trade, a first-time visitor is trying to settle the same short list. Do you do my kind of thing. Do you come to where I live. Roughly what does it cost. How do I get hold of you, and how quickly will you answer.

They aren't reading. They're scanning for those four, and they'll leave the moment it looks like the page isn't going to provide them.

So the whole design problem for a homepage is: put those four in the first screen, in plain words, and get out of the way.

What the first screen should actually say

Not a slogan. A sentence that names what you do and where.

Boiler repairs, servicing and landlord checks in Chorlton, Didsbury and Withington. Most repairs are £90 to £250. Ring 0161 xxx xxxx — I usually answer, and if I don't I ring back the same day.

That's the whole hero section. It looks almost rude compared with the usual homepage, and it answers all four questions before anyone has scrolled a pixel.

Notice what it doesn't contain. No welcome. No "we pride ourselves". No years of experience, which every competitor also claims and nobody checks. Those things can live further down, where the people who are still interested will find them.

Write your headline the way somebody would describe you

Here's a quick way to find the right words. Imagine a past customer recommending you to a neighbour over the fence. What do they say?

They say "he does boilers, he's local, he came out the same day." They don't say "they're a leading provider of domestic heating services." The first version is your headline. The second is what happens when you try to sound like a bigger company than you are, which is the single most common mistake on small business homepages.

Plain always beats impressive here, because plain is what gets understood in eight seconds.

Put a price signal in, even though you don't want to

This is the hardest advice to take and the most valuable. Every job is different, you can't commit to a number, and you're worried about being undercut.

All true, and the visitor still has to find out somehow. If your homepage gives them nothing, their only route is to ring a stranger and ask, and a large share of people won't do that. They'll go to the next result instead.

A range with a condition solves it without committing you. "Most repairs come in between £90 and £250 — it depends whether it's a part or a whole unit." You've told somebody whether they're in the right place, which is all they wanted, and you've quietly filtered out the people who were never going to be customers.

Make contacting you a two-second job

The phone number goes in the first screen, and on a phone it should dial when tapped. That sounds obvious and a remarkable number of sites get it wrong by putting the number in an image.

Say how you'd prefer to be reached, and say what happens next. "Text me a photo and I'll come back with a rough price today" is worth more than any contact form, because it tells somebody what to expect.

And if you do have a form, keep it to three fields. Every extra box loses people, and nobody has ever abandoned an enquiry because they weren't asked enough questions.

Below the fold, in this order

Once the first screen has done its job, the rest of the page should go: what you do in a bit more detail, where you cover by name, a few photos of real finished work, a handful of reviews, and then the practical stuff about how you work.

Put the towns in actual text. It's the second most common question and it's the one most often buried in a map nobody can read on a phone.

Keep the whole page short enough to scroll through in under a minute. A homepage isn't where you say everything — it's where you get someone to the page that says more.

The questions the homepage can't hold

There's a limit to this, and it's worth being honest about it. A homepage has room for maybe six facts. People turn up with two dozen questions, and the ones that stop them are usually the specific ones: would you look at a system that old, can you come before Friday, do you take the old unit away, would you do the smaller version instead.

Those get asked late at night, into a search box or an AI app, because asking a person feels like a commitment. A page can't answer back, so the ones who don't ring just quietly go elsewhere.

That's the gap hailera exists to fill: you write all those answers once, check them yourself, and publish them as an agent, so your own site and the apps people ask can answer directly rather than guessing from six lines of homepage. The first screen above does the bulk of the work by itself, though, so get that right before you look at anything else.

Write it in a text message first

The best trick for a homepage is to not write it on a website. Open your phone and write the whole thing as a message to a friend who's asked what you do.

You'll produce something short, specific and in your own voice, because that's how people write messages. Then put that on the page, almost unchanged, and resist every urge to smarten it up. The smartening is what turns a useful page back into a brochure.

Today: open your homepage on a phone and read only what's visible before you scroll. Write down which of the four questions it answers. Whichever ones are missing, that's the rewrite.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.