Every homepage has about five seconds to earn the scroll. Get the layout wrong and it doesn’t matter how good the copy or design underneath it is, people bounce before they ever read it. Get it right and the page does the selling for you before anyone’s even spoken to the team.
We get asked a lot what makes a homepage ‘optimised’. It’s not a magic template. It’s a proven order of sections, each one doing a specific job, building trust and momentum until the visitor’s ready to act. Here’s how we build them, and why the order matters as much as the content.
1. Hero section: the five-second pitch
This is what people see before they’ve scrolled an inch, so it has to answer three things fast: what you do, who it’s for, and what to do next. One clear headline, one supporting line, one primary button. Resist the urge to cram in everything you offer here, that’s what the rest of the page is for. A cluttered hero is the single biggest reason good homepages underperform.
2. Navigation: the map, not the destination
Nav sits above the hero but it’s easy to overthink. Keep it short, obvious, and consistent. Five to seven items, plain language over clever labels, and a visible way to contact or get a quote. If people have to think about where to click, you’ve already lost some of them.
3. The value proposition
Straight after the hero, this section earns the scroll by answering ‘so what?’. Why you, why now, why does this matter to the person reading it. This is where you translate features into outcomes. Nobody cares that you use a particular tech stack, they care what it means for them.
4. Social proof
Logos, stats, review scores, a line from a happy client. Doesn’t matter how good your pitch is, people trust other people more than they trust a brand talking about itself. This section is doing quiet, unglamorous work, reassuring the sceptical visitor that you’re the real deal before they’ve committed any more time to reading.
5. Features and services
Now you’ve earned the right to go into detail. This is where you lay out what you actually do, broken into scannable chunks: icons, short headings, a couple of lines each. Long paragraphs die here. People are skimming, not studying.
6. Proof of work
Case studies, project highlights, before-and-afters. This is the section that turns ‘sounds good’ into ‘they can actually do it’. If you’ve got results, numbers, or a genuinely happy client story, this is where it earns its keep, right before you ask for anything.
7. Secondary call to action
Not everyone’s ready to buy after the hero, and not everyone gets that far, so give people who’ve read this far a natural next step. This can be a bit warmer and more specific than the hero CTA, since they now know a lot more about you.
8. FAQs
A short FAQ block clears up the objections stopping someone getting in touch, price, timescales, how it works, without cluttering the main copy. It’s also doing double duty for SEO, since these are often the exact questions people are typing into Google, or asking ChatGPT.
9. Footer
The bit everyone forgets about and nobody should. Contact details, address, opening hours, links to key pages, socials. A weak footer is a missed opportunity, it’s prime real estate for the visitor who’s scrolled the whole page and is now looking for a way to act, or check you’re legit.
Why we wireframe before committing to the full design
Every section above has a job to do, and that job depends entirely on order, hierarchy and what’s said where. None of that is about colour palettes or fonts. That’s exactly why we wireframe before we design.
A wireframe strips everything back to structure: what goes where, how much space it gets, what the hierarchy is. It lets us test and agree the logic of the page, does the story flow, does the CTA land at the right moment, before anyone’s emotionally attached to a colour scheme or a headline font. Change a wireframe and it costs nothing. Change a finished design because the structure was wrong from the start, and you’re redoing real work.
Get the skeleton right first, and the design’s job becomes making a good structure look brilliant, not rescuing a bad one.
