eCommerce homepage design – 10 tips to make your page stand out

Article topics

1. Ensure things are as easy to find as possible…
2. … But make sure your homepage isn’t hard to use
3. Be consistent with your branding
4. Make sure your home page is mobile-responsive
5. Use trust signals
6. Implement pop-ups (but do them right)
7. Check your page speed
8. Create a content calendar
9. Use CRO to see what drives the most clicks
10. Check your metrics frequently

For most of your customers, the homepage of your eCommerce site is the first thing they’ll see when they visit your website.

This means you need to make sure it looks good, loads quickly, and encourages your customers to stay online for as long as possible.

Whether you’re creating a homepage for a new website or want to redesign your existing homepage, we’ve put together ten expert tips to help your design shine!

1. Ensure things are as easy to find as possible….

Unlike other pages on your website (for example, a landing page), the aim of your homepage is to encourage customers to move around the rest of your site.

You may want to use your homepage to:

• Tell customers more about what you do
• Guide shoppers towards your latest products
• Provide easy access to your returns policy
• Encourage site visitors to sign up for your newsletter

Your homepage is a unique section of your website, as it means different things to different people!

When planning the design of your homepage, it’s essential to know your key goals as a business. This will help you identify the pages you want to promote, and how you’ll promote them on your homepage.

It’s also vital to know how customers will search for information. For example, 43% of people advise that they use a search bar to find what they want on a website. If you don’t have a search bar on your homepage, adding one and displaying it prominently could be a quick win for your business.

2. … But make sure your homepage isn’t hard to use

You’ll have a lot of content to add to your homepage, but it’s still important that everything is easy to find, as well as easy to click on.

Here’s something to bear in mind. 75% of websites don’t implement image carousels correctly. For example, allowing images in the carousel to move too quickly, meaning homepage visitors click on the wrong photo and link.

A poor user experience (UX) can mean frustrated customers, which means lost sales.

Here are some ways you can enhance the UX of your homepage to keep shoppers happy:

• Use white space – this is when you leave room around all the different elements on your page. This makes your content easier to read and reduces clutter
• Test your homepage on different browsers – your homepage may look fine on Chrome but not on Safari
• Consider accessibility – for example, correctly defined alt text
• Ensure the elements on your homepage load quickly – we’ll talk about this in more detail later!

3. Be consistent with your branding

Think of your homepage like the front of a brick-and-mortar store. It’s a fantastic opportunity to tell customers more about you, as well as entice them to come in and take a look around.

Strong and consistent branding can set you apart from the competition, tell a story, and make you appear more trustworthy in the eyes of prospective shoppers. It can even lead to up to 33% more revenue for your business!

Take the Apple homepage for example. It’s minimalist, monochrome, and simple to use – just like an iPhone or Apple Watch.

One of the easiest ways to ensure your homepage is consistent with your brand colours, typography, and tone of voice is through a style guide. A document that details the ins and outs of your brand, you can use it to ensure everyone in your business knows how your homepage needs to look and feel. You can also give it to third-party agencies and freelancers to ensure they create copy, imagery, and web elements that look right at home on your homepage.

4. Make sure your home page is mobile-responsive

In 2023, three out of four retail website visits were made on a smartphone.

This means it’s essential that your homepage looks good and functions well on mobile and tablet. The good news is that most eCommerce platforms (for example, Shopify and Magento) use mobile responsive design as standard.

However, it’s still important to regularly test your homepage to ensure any new elements you implement don’t impact your page’s appearance on mobile. For example, a new call-to-action button may be hard to click with a finger, or a carousel may crowd the screen, meaning important information is layered behind it.

It’s okay for the desktop and mobile versions of your homepage to look different in the name of usability and accessibility.

Take the ASOS homepage, for example. On mobile, the menu at the bottom of the page is hidden, just as all the additional links may be trickier to access. However, customers can still get to these links by clicking on the ‘hamburger’ menu at the top-left hand corner of the site.

5. Use trust signals

Ever wondered why some eCommerce businesses show off the awards they’ve won and the accreditations they’ve achieved on their homepages? It’s all to boost credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of their customers.

A trust signal is any type of content that shows prospective customers can trust you. Reviews, ratings, testimonials, awards…. even links to social media profiles count!

According to Trustpilot, star ratings and reviews on a homepage are the trust signals most likely to convince customers to make a purchase. For example, The Welsh Cheese Company has displayed its Trustpilot rating above the fold just below the main image on its homepage.

Try different combinations of trust signals on your homepage and see which lead to the best results for your eCommerce site.

6. Implement pop-ups (but do them right)

When you need to provide additional information to customers or convince them to carry out a specific call-to-action, a pop-up on your homepage can work well.

However, it’s vital to ensure your pop-ups don’t frustrate your customers.

Pop-ups are an oddity in the world of digital marketing – they drive high conversion rates, but web visitors claim not to like them. While the average conversion rate of a pop-up is 11%, 64% of people claim that pop-ups drive them to download ad-blocking software.

If you do use pop-ups on your homepage, it’s essential to test them thoroughly. Are they easy to dismiss, do they contain helpful information, and do they work correctly on mobile?

It’s also worth testing different pop-up ad types and placements to see which result in the highest conversion rates. For example, your customers may prefer banner ads to full-screen pop-ups.

Gamification pop-ups can work well on eCommerce homepages and encourage customers (especially younger ones) to participate. However, they’re not suitable for all industries, and some shoppers might find them annoying.

7. Check your page speed

Homepages can often be hectic places, with lots of images, videos, and data-intensive extensions and plugins.

The issue with this is that all these assets can significantly hamper your page load speed. And if a web page takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of people will leave.

Your page speed can also affect your search engine ranking too. A faster page means a better user experience, which in turn leads to improved SEO for your homepage.

So, what can you do to improve your homepage load speed?

• Regularly check your page load speed on both desktop and mobile. Google PageSpeed Insights is free and provides valuable suggestions you can implement
• Reduce the file size of any images or videos you use – you can make a significant impact on file size without affecting quality
• Ask your website developer to minify your homepage code – this will reduce the time your page takes to load
• Remove any extensions or plugins you no longer use
• Implement lazy loading’ – this is when files and assets are only loaded on your homepage when they are needed
• If you sell internationally, a content delivery network can make your homepage load more quickly in other counties

Check out more ways you can reduce the page load speed of your homepage.

8. Create a content calendar

Your homepage is prime real estate for your brand. You can use it to promote your latest sale, showcase your newest range of products, and tell your company’s story.

For example, Ding Dong Dim Sum has used its homepage to inform customers of the upcoming Chinese New Year.

Plus, regularly refreshing the content and imagery on your homepage encourages visitors to keep coming back.

The easiest way to determine what you’ll promote front and centre on your homepage is through the use of a content calendar.

A content calendar allows you to plan what will be on your homepage throughout the year, what tasks your team needs to do, and who in your team will be responsible.

Don’t forget to be flexible when it comes to what you promote on your homepage. Adhoc and last-minute developments (such as a flash sale) may mean you need to shuffle things around.

9. Use CRO to see what drives the most clicks

In this article, we’ve talked about testing different things on your homepage to see what your website visitors respond best to. This is known as conversion rate optimisation or CRO.

With CRO, you’re taking a scientific approach to enhancing your homepage, using data to determine potential things you can change, and running experiments to see what works. By being methodical and analytical, you can identify the results that drive change.

Here’s an example of how you might use CRO on your homepage. You use heat mapping technology and find out that people aren’t clicking on the call-to-action button that encourages customers to check out your latest range of products.

You then implement A/B testing and try different variations of your call-to-action button to see what changes lead to an increase in clicks.

10. Check your metrics frequently

And finally, it’s important to remember that your homepage will do a lot of the heavy lifting for your eCommerce store. Odds are that it’s the page on your site that gets the most visits!

It’s important to regularly check your metrics to make sure your homepage is working as well as it should. The metrics you’ll monitor will depend on your industry, goals, and the structure of your homepage, but good starting points are:

• Traffic sources. Where are your visitors coming from, for example, Google or your social media posts? Using UTM tracking codes makes it easier to identify which source leads to the most clicks
• Bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the number of visitors that leave your homepage without taking further action. A high bounce rate can indicate that people are struggling to find what they want
• Clicks to pages. Which products are most viewed and purchased from your homepages? Identifying your top-performing products can help you determine where to place them to get the most sales
• Time spent on page. This is an interesting metric as a lot of time spent on your homepage could indicate visitors are engaging with your page, but it could also indicate that they’re struggling to find what they want. Partner it with other metrics (for example, bounce rate) to get a clearer picture

Five eCommerce KPIs to give your store the advantage

Use what you learn to optimise your eCommerce home page so it keeps driving clicks and making sales for your business!

Want to get more insights into how to transform your eCommerce store using SEO, branding, and paid social? Check out our blog!