Your homepage is doing three jobs and none of them well

A homepage that tries to be a brochure, a catalogue and a contact form at once ends up being a scroll. Every section is fighting the one above it for the same three seconds of attention, and the visitor resolves the fight by leaving.

When we take a site apart, the first thing we do is write down what the page is actually for in one sentence. Not what it contains — what it is for. If that sentence needs an "and" in the middle, there are two pages in there wearing one coat.

The test is simple enough to run yourself. Open your homepage, scroll to the bottom, and count how many different things it asks you to do. Call, browse, read about us, download the guide, follow us, subscribe. Six asks is the same as no ask.

What replaces it is not less content. It is the same content, sorted: one page that says who you help and what happens next, and a set of pages behind it that go deep for the people who want depth. The homepage stops being a summary of the business and starts being a door.

We usually find the deep pages already exist. They are just buried three levels down, written last, and never linked from anywhere a visitor would look. Moving them up is often the entire job.