If you’re leading potential visitors to your site’s homepage, you have three seconds to keep the visitor on the site. Your main headline and sub-headline need to pique the reader’s interest, but there are other elements that also need to be incorporated into the design.

Missing any of these elements can drastically impact your homepage’s performance.

What elements does your site need?

1. Calls-to-Action

You can’t afford to miss calls-to-action. If you’re not including calls-to-action, the reader may not know what actions to take. This HVAC site has a “schedule your appointment” button right above-the-fold. This can lead a reader to schedule an appointment rather than clicking off the page.

Other forms of calls-to-action may include:

• Get an estimate
• Contact us for a free consultation
• Call for a quote

Include phone numbers or forms – depending on your site’s goal.

2. Trust Elements

Part of nurturing a lead is getting the lead to trust you. A lot of leads are going to try and find trust elements which are placed on your homepage. Trust elements can be a variety of different things:

• Logos from the Better Business Bureau or trade associations
• License numbers
• Reviews from past customers
• Testimonials from past customers
• Ratings from reputable sources

Any form of social proof works very well to build trust. You’ll want to add these trust elements to further nudge the visitor to choose your product or service.

3. Core Services

Service-based businesses need to have all of their core products or services listed on the main page. If you don’t list these offers on the main page, people may not go deeper into your site structure to find them. Now, you can’t make this section too long, so you’ll want to keep any copy for services to 80 – 100 words for each service or product.

You can then lead the visitor to the main page for the service or product as you see fit. These core services are going to help you improve retention and conversions.

4. Location Information

E-commerce stores can get away without having their location information listed on the homepage, but service businesses will not be able to get away with not including this information. If you’re a local business, it’s important to list the following:

• Name
• Address
• Phone

NAP (name, address, phone number) is very important because people will be looking for it. It's good practice to include your NAP in the footer and at the top of the homepage, too.

5. Supporting Imagery

Humans are visual creatures, and it’s much easier to keep a person’s attention when images are used. Of course, you want to compress images and optimize them so that they don’t take too long to load.

But when used properly, images can:

• Capture the reader’s emotions
• Cause a reader to take action
• Provide a visual for your business’ story

Videos can also be used in the same sense, but the video ought to be short so that the user watches it in its entirety. A good tip is to put your most important information first in the video so that it’s not overlooked by the viewer.