Your homepage is the first thing visitors will see when they land on your website, so it’s your chance to make a great first impression. A well-designed homepage can entice visitors to stick around and explore your site more, while a lackluster welcome could turn away potential customers.
Grabbing visitors’ attention comes down to creating a homepage that’s exciting, unique, and eye-catching. The best website builders for small businesses make this fairly easy, but incorporating a few design tricks can help put your homepage on top. In this guide, we’ll explore 10 homepage design elements to make your website pop.
Short on Time? Here Are the 10 Design Elements To Include
- Logo: Make your business instantly recognizable with a memorable logo.
- Branded color scheme: Use a consistent color scheme to enhance your brand and draw visitors to your site.
- Hero text: Tell visitors what to expect on your site with a catchphrase, mission statement, or tagline.
- Call to action: Make it easy for visitors to take the next step, like getting in touch or visiting your pricing page.
- Streamlined navigation menu: Keep your navigation menu clean and simple so it invites visitors to explore your site further.
- Eye-catching imagery: Give your site a unique look with images, videos, and graphics.
- Negative spaces: Leave empty spaces between content elements to keep your site organized and ensure important elements stand out.
- Features and benefits: Highlight the features or benefits you offer, keeping in mind your audiences’ needs.
- Social proof: Show off how much people love your business to help turn visitors into customers.
- Contact details: Make it easy for visitors to get in touch without having to navigate through multiple pages.
10 Homepage Design Elements To Make Your Website Pop
1. Logo
A memorable logo is key to branding your site and making your business stick in visitors’ minds. It helps your website appear more professional and trustworthy and stand out from competitors.
You can put your logo in the top-left corner of your homepage, next to your navigation menus, or centered at the top of your site. It doesn’t need to be huge, but it should be large enough for visitors to notice and see any details in the design.
If you don’t already have a logo, many website builders offer logo design tools. For example, Wix has a free and easy-to-use logo designer that lets you create a custom graphic in minutes. There are also inexpensive AI logo generators that can help you bring more advanced designs to life.
2. Branded Color Scheme
The color scheme you choose for your brand should be consistent across your business, including your website, packaging, business cards, and other materials. Like having a logo, a consistent color scheme makes your business appear more professional and helps visitors remember it.
If you’re just starting out and need to choose a color scheme, we recommend using a color palette generator like Khroma or Color Hunt. These ensure you’re using complementary colors instead of clashing ones.
If you use a website builder like Squarespace, you don’t have to worry about this since there are preset color schemes available for each template. If you have a specific color you want to use on your site, you can enter its RGB code in your website builder’s color palette tool.
Once you have a color scheme, you can build on your brand’s colors to make your homepage stand out. One option is to use your brand colors for important elements like your navigation menu, hero text, or call to action button. You can then use complementary colors for elements like your page’s background or header.
3. Hero Text
Your site’s hero text is the text you display most prominently on your homepage. It should use a large font size and be the first thing visitors read when they land on your site.
What you write here is important—it needs to engage visitors while telling them why they should keep exploring your site. Keep the text short and snappy and focus on what your audience wants most from a business like yours. Ideally, you should call out what makes your business different or the key benefits customers will get from using your products and services.
While not essential, many websites also include secondary text below their hero text. This should be in a smaller font and can be up to three sentences long. The goal of your secondary text is to provide additional information about what your business does and how you can benefit customers.
Secondary text can also include keywords relevant to your industry, which help make your website more visible to search engines.
4. Call to Action
Your hero text should always be followed by a call to action, which is typically a button that visitors can click to take the next step in your sales funnel. As an example, the button could take visitors to your pricing page or the registration page for a free trial.
Your call to action button should be designed to stand out. Use your brand’s colors and make the button clearly visible on the page. Visitors shouldn’t have to scroll down to reach your call to action.
The text you use should be no more than a few words and encourage potential customers to click. Common examples include, “Check out our plans” and “Start a 7-day free trial.”
It’s okay for your homepage to include multiple calls to action, but they should be relatively spaced out. For example, you could have a sign-up button at the top of your homepage, then another button encouraging visitors to contact your sales team further down the page.
5. Streamlined Navigation Menu
Every website should have a visible navigation menu. That way, visitors know what else they’ll find on your website if they want to explore further.
It’s important to keep your navigation menu streamlined. You don’t want visitors to feel overwhelmed, which can sharply increase your bounce rates. Ideally, it should have just a few main pages covering topics like features, pricing, and contact details.
If your website has a lot of pages—for example, multiple product categories, blog posts, support options, and more—you can use a drop-down menu to consolidate what visitors see when they first reach your homepage. This keeps visitors’ focus on the rest of the homepage but still enables them to find their way around quickly.
6. Eye-Catching Imagery
Adding eye-catching imagery to your homepage is another important way to make your site pop. You can use photos, videos, illustrations, and more to show off your products and services and give visitors a deeper look at your business. If you don’t have great photos or other visual content, you can use stock photos, graphic design websites, or an AI image generator like ImageFX to create graphics instantly.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to adding imagery to your homepage. Some websites grab eyeballs with a full-width background image or video, while others put the focus on their hero text and incorporate smaller graphics around it.
More creative ideas include using an illustration to frame your hero text, as Squarespace does on its homepage. You can also display a full-screen video reel to make your site feel more dynamic. If you want to dazzle visitors with a unique data visualization on your homepage, consider adding a treemap.
Play around with different designs and ask friends, family, and colleagues what they think looks best.
7. Negative Spaces
Negative spaces, also called white spaces, are empty spaces between content elements. When used properly, negative spaces can make your site look more organized and help your content pop off the page.
8. Features and Benefits
When visitors scroll down your homepage, they should find more information about your products and services. Instead of getting into the weeds, offer a high-level overview of your features, benefits, and unique offerings. Keep the specific needs of your audience in mind and clearly highlight how you can meet those needs.
If you’re using a website builder, you can achieve this by using content elements that combine text and images. Just add an image of the feature you want to highlight and explain why your customers will love that feature. Most site builders offer this type of content element, so there’s no custom coding or time-consuming formatting required.
9. Social Proof
Testimonials and reviews from existing customers can help convince visitors that your business is the one they should choose. Social proof is very effective at increasing conversion rates because it gives visitors confidence that your business can deliver.
Most website builders offer content elements that make it easy to add testimonials. Some, like GoDaddy, also have integrations so you can display reviews and ratings from sites like Yelp and Trustpilot.
10. Contact Details
You should always give visitors a way to get in touch, whether that’s by phone, email, or even visiting your business’ physical storefront. You can do this with a dedicated contact page, but it’s also helpful to include contact information directly on your homepage. This sends the message that you’re eager to hear from customers.
You can add contact details or a simple contact form at the bottom of your homepage or in your site’s footer.
Conclusion
Making your website’s homepage design is crucial to drawing in visitors and keeping them on your site. Design elements like a recognizable logo, engaging hero text, a call to action, and strong imagery are all important for making your homepage stand out.
You should also highlight how your website can meet visitors’ needs and offer social proof that your business is the best choice.
Incorporating these design elements into your website is easy with the best website builders for small businesses. Start crafting your homepage today to create a one-of-a-kind website.
