Homepage Design
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Your homepage functions as both an overview of your business and a series of cryptic directions designed to assist both new and returning customers in navigating your brand to discover what they're looking for. Homepage Design.

Whether the purpose of your homepage is to sell your items or gather email subscribers, every element should work together, much like a landing page, to capture a positive first impression and inspire the required action.

There isn't just one method to design a homepage. However, whether you're creating a website or redesigning the homepage of an existing website, here are some suggestions to keep in mind as you plan your homepage from top to bottom.

How to design an effective homepage

A user's attention is captured by the best ecommerce websites in less than 10 seconds, according to an expert study. From a design standpoint, you must ensure that the navigational flow is obvious so that visitors can rapidly choose the best route for themselves (and for your business); this means balanced white space, clear navigation, and deliberate design components.

A psychological characteristic known as “decision avoidance”—the propensity of people to make decisions that take too long—increases the urgency of the decision.

Decision avoidance on a homepage means “bouncing” by leaving the page or using the back button. To avoid this, your homepage's primary objective should be to persuade customers to stay.

Remember the user experience

While it's easy to be distracted by font choices and color schemes, it's crucial to remember that your homepage's goal is to persuade visitors to explore your items and eventually make a purchase. The simplest approach to doing this is to design a simple, clear, and intuitive user experience (UX).

Here are some questions to help you decide what creates a great user experience for the best website designs and homepages:

  • Can you eliminate any steps?
  • What do you want the visitor to do?
  • How simple is it for them to do this?
  • How many steps does it take to complete your goal?
  • How much information do they need to proceed to the next step?
  • How easy is it for users to get from your homepage to your online store?

Sometimes visitors arrive at homepages with a clear idea of what they want, and other times they don't. Both must be considered while creating your homepage, and you must make sure that your choices support your main objectives.

While guiding the attention of those visitors who aren't seeking that particular result, a decent homepage should satisfy those who are.

Choose the right fonts and color scheme

UX comes first, but you may also alter your store's theme and choose the fonts and color palette for your homepage. To establish a unified visual design that encourages brand awareness, the font should coordinate with your current identity. The same is true of your color palette.

Your font can be too challenging to read in certain circumstances. It's OK to modify here since it's more crucial to design your homepage with the user in mind. For design elements like banners and footer graphics, think about using your brand's font; otherwise, stay with something more neutral for the remaining text.

When it comes to colors, you should also make sure to keep your design simple and stay loyal to your brand. Consider using white space to break up your colors if they are too intense to observe for an extended period on a screen. For CTA buttons, borders, links, and other page design elements on the homepage, you may use your brand colors.

The sleek homepage design of Peppy Debs‘ vintage brand website makes it simple to explore despite its colorful, aggressive branding. The brand opts to use a simpler, more approachable font instead of the one from its logo. Additionally, design elements like buttons and font colors take advantage of the brand's color palette.

Peppy Debs - Homepage Design

Use eye-catching imagery

All of the homepage's elements fall within the decision-avoidance principle. When creating your homepage, being aware of the user's attention span constraints can help you focus on the most important elements.

Your images should capture the user's attention as soon as they land on your website, whether you're attempting to promote a product or collection, gather leads, or both.

Here are a few ways to incorporate visuals into your homepage design:

Image with text overlay

Above-the-fold photography in this style often combines a single, powerful picture, straightforward writing, and a call to action. It functions well for retailers that wish to highlight a prominent deal above the fold, such as a limited-time discount, a flagship product, or a seasonal line.

Slideshows

You might decide to incorporate a slideshow with each slide that promotes a particular offer, an assortment of goods, or an excellent product image.

Store owners who offer a wide range of products in a few categories frequently use this strategy when they want to highlight a few collections or pages to visitors.

The slides should be arranged according to priority, starting with the slide having the greatest importance. Since users won't spend much time looking at a single slide before moving on to the next step, it's advisable to keep your presentation to no more than three slides.

Video

Some companies might profit from having a homepage image that communicates their narrative. Before you can pique visitors' attention, it can be important to provide product examples for certain products, particularly those that are difficult or revolutionary.

Take Bottle Cutting Inc.'s homepage as an example. The homepage builds enthusiasm around the product via a video presentation since many visitors are probably unaware of their immediate need for it. This is a natural initial step in the conversion process.

Bottle Cutting Inc - Homepage Design

Make sure your photographs are of the highest quality and accurately reflect your brand since they have such a strong, instant effect.

If you're not a photographer, you may choose from our library of cost-free stock images using the image picker in the Shopify theme editor.

Animations

Your homepage design becomes more interactive and visually interesting with animations. You may use animated GIFs with genuine photos and videos or graphically drawn animations.

On its homepage, Ocean Park Swimwear offers animation in the form of an animated GIF. Several different videos showing the swimsuits in use are included in the animated GIF. The videos depict the products in certain use scenarios since they are intended for active ladies who wish to wear swimsuits while participating in water activities.

Ocean Park Swimwear GIF

This animated GIF works nicely with the brand's homepage language and design elements, as well as other product images.

Ocean Park Swimwear - Homepage Design

Keep mobile homepage design in mind

Over the last several years, mobile web traffic has steadily increased and now accounts for more than half of all worldwide traffic. Every decision you make regarding the design of your homepage should consider mobile SEO since a substantial amount of your traffic is probably coming from mobile sources.

For mobile users, it is even more crucial to streamline your homepage so that it points users in the direction of a certain course of action. Check out the sample below to see how skincare brand Blendily reiterates its value propositions and then invites mobile users to investigate its products using an obvious black “Shop” CTA button.

Blendily - Homepage Design

The elements of any theme in the Shopify Theme Shop automatically adapt depending on screen size if you are a Shopify store owner. However, bear in mind that on a mobile phone, photographs that look great on a huge desktop screen could be oddly cropped or chopped out. Calls to action may be hidden or positioned in a manner that encourages visitors to find the page without taking action.

By using the view toggle choices at the top of your preview, you can quickly see how your homepage design looks on various devices in the Shopify theme editor.

Above-the-fold content inspires action

You must now comprehend the function of the most precious real estate on your website. When web designers refer to a section of the homepage as being “above the fold,” they are referring to what visitors view before deciding whether or not to scroll—kind of like the front entrance of your homepage.

Focus on the activities you want the visitor to take when they first come to your site, the information they need initially, and how you can assist them in making a decision when thinking about what appears above the fold and how that complements the rest of your homepage.

To retain new visitors on the page and acquaint them with the brand, the majority of the best ecommerce website designs use headers that combine an attention-grabbing headline, persuading subtext, and an appealing image above the fold.

A promotional banner placed above your navigation to promote a limited-time deal or free delivery is just one of many additional methods you may use to capture a customer's attention right away.

Need visuals for your header?

Burst is a free stock picture website offered by Shopify that offers handpicked photographs for business owners and creatives. Browse thousands of photos of products and ways of presenting products that are tailored to your header.

Browse Burst now

Clear navigation

A website's ease of navigation depends on its simplicity. When you consider how rapidly people go from page to page on the web, this may seem counterintuitive when you wish to accommodate diverse sorts of visitors.

The pathways that mean the most to the majority of visitors should be prioritised in the header navigation, which should be as simple as feasible. The strategic director of Orbit Media Studios, Andy Crestodina, suggests limiting the number of navigation links on your homepage to seven.

Information is divided into manageable mental units called “chunks” in the organisational memory technique called “chunking” used by humans.

Memory retention is made simpler when the number of pieces decreases. George Miller, a psychology professor, concluded that human short-term memory can typically only remember seven objects at once in a significant study written in 1956.

Too many navigation choices on a website may make it appear crowded and overwhelming, which makes it more likely that visitors will take or go down the incorrect path. Prioritizing your navigation links from left to right, with the most crucial pages on the left, is a smart strategy.

If you have a lot of products and collections, focus your homepage navigation on your primary top-level collections and add sub-navigation using a “mega menu” or a drop-down menu.

Sub-navigation is a great method to arrange your pages and products for simple exploration without immediately overburdening customers with choices.

Because such pages help them achieve their main objectives, several websites additionally include links to their About Us page, Contact Us page, FAQ page, and other pages in their top navigation.

However, if you find that visitors to these pages aren't converting, it's probably because of these links, which divert them off the conversion path. If so, it would be better to include these links in the footer.

Direct call to action

Like an exit sign on a highway, a call to action should be brief and obvious and direct the correct drivers to the necessary action.

Your calls to action and the pages they direct visitors to should support the actions a client may take to advance the primary objectives of your homepage. This may be an invitation for users to see an instructional film to learn more or connect to your most recent collection.

Your call to action button should stand out from the surrounding design so that the user can see where to click right away. A user is more likely to become lost or click away if it takes them a while to find the call to action.

Learn more: Did you know that our website builder can manage all the challenges of ecommerce? We can easily develop and maintain your store's website, complete with a stunning online storefront and a powerful content management system.

Easy-to-access shopping cart

Most ecommerce websites have a shopping cart on their homepage.

Making sure that your customers can easily find their shopping carts is a crucial aspect of making their navigation straightforward. A “sticky” shopping cart (also known as a “slide-out” cart), which is offered in certain Shopify themes, is a cart that remains visible and accessible on the screen the whole time you are browsing, often in the top-right corner.

Even better, you can also show how many items the consumer has in their cart right now. Customers are reminded that their purchase is still being processed by a large, conspicuous message next to the cart that lists the number of items that have been added so far and urges them to finish the checkout process.

The bottom line is to tell customers when and how to access the items in their cart.

The Chubbies homepage has a slide-out cart that makes it simple for users to continue shopping or check out, as well as a blue circle that indicates how many items are currently in the user's cart.

Chubbies Homepage Design

Search bar

Many online retailers include a search box to assist visitors who know precisely what they are searching for, along with minimal navigation and a sticky cart—especially if they have a large selection of products or a lot of material to peruse.

Morphe, for example, offers a diverse range of products. Morphe has incorporated a smart search bar that automatically completes a visitor's search query with recommended products, collections, and pages to make it simpler for their customers to find what they're searching for. This establishes a straight path from the homepage to the page the user is seeking.

Morphe Homepage Design

Users that finish a search are often more likely to convert. If your brand sells a lot of products, a simple search bar provides an alternative to complicated navigation that is likely to repel customers.

Hire professionals with proven, Shopify-specific expertise.

Are you looking for assistance creating the perfect store? A curated network of businesses and independent contractors known as Shopify Experts creates stunning, personalised shops. You may work with them directly via your Shopify admin after hiring them through the Shopify Experts Marketplace.

Hire expert help today

Below the fold: Other homepage elements to consider

Although they frequently reinforce and enlarge the information you've already introduced, offer additional routes to the same conversion objective, and make other pages accessible to customers who need them, elements displayed below the fold (i.e., after users scroll) aren't necessarily less significant.

According to their significance to your objectives, the following elements may either be part of your homepage design or your footer.

Blogs, videos, and other content

Although blog and video content might be excellent for SEO, content that appears above the fold may draw shoppers' attention to your products. Generally, you want users to find your products via your content rather than the other way around. If your content isn't central to your business's operations, you should think about putting links to it in the footer or below the fold to make it easier for users who have decided to browse your content to find it.

You might add a link to your top navigation if you wanted to advertise your content, but it's often preferable to accomplish this via email, social media, and other third-party websites so that it may attract outside traffic to your own website.

Social proof: Customer reviews, endorsements, and press

Social proof is a kind of brand endorsement that draws on the confidence already held in your company by clients or industry visitors. This may include media coverage, evaluations, social media postings, Instagram galleries, or recommendations from authorities or influencers.

Your homepage could be a suitable spot for it if you have strong social evidence that you can use.

Low-priority and add-on products

It can be worthwhile to move older products and add-on products to the bottom of your homepage. After all, you wish to establish a strong first impression with your signature products or your most recent product lines.

If you're offering a product that needs replacement parts or refills, lower-priced products that go well with your primary products work best as impulse buys used as an upsell at checkout, but they may also be put on the homepage, below the fold, to make visitors aware of them.

For instance, LIV concentrates on watches but promotes its high-end products, such as straps, near the bottom of its homepage.

LIV

Lower priority pages

Depending on your business strategy, you may have different pages that you see as of low importance. The footer is generally the best place for pages like your terms of service, privacy statement, or return policy. Since the footer often contains links to these pages, many visitors will naturally seek them out there if they need to access these pages.

Your footer may also include other links, such as those to your About Us page, contact information, store locations, or purchase tracking pages. However, you might think about giving them more importance in your top navigation or even in the design of your homepage if they really encourage potential customers to make a purchase from you or help you achieve another important objective.

By including a prominent FAQ link in its homepage navigation, a retailer offering a subscription service, for instance, may be able to drastically reduce the number of support queries it receives.

Ask yourself how much you stand to gain if you send visitors to a page immediately and if it helps to divert attention from or draw it to your targeted results to determine whether a page is a low priority.

10 best homepage design examples

PopSockets

PopSockets

Conversion rate optimization and huge, bold design trends are expertly balanced on the PopSockets homepage. The target audience is engaged by the compelling product picture, and there are several calls to action throughout.

Pop Sockects trending

The homepage's primary objective is to urge the user to browse their most recent product range, and nothing above the fold detracts from this objective. More CTAs to purchase other products will appear as you scroll down.

Designed by You

Benoa Swim

Benoa Swim

Benoa Swim, a sustainable swimwear brand, likewise effectively mixes beautiful homepage design with practicality and simple functionality. A simple navigation bar and sizable, high-quality product images are included on the homepage.

You may scroll through the newest collections and discover the company's dedication to sustainability by scrolling down. These are some of its distinctive selling points.

Benoa Swim design

In a clever move, Benoa enables users to purchase a highlighted item right from the homepage page of the website without even going to the product page. Lowering the number of steps required for a purchase is a great way to optimize for more conversions.

Benoa Swim cart design

Common Heir

Common Heir homepage design

Common Heir sells skin care products online using an attractive homepage design. The homepage features crucial elements such as a simple navigation bar, contrasting colors that make it easier to read, and CTA buttons throughout.

Common Heir atb design

The brand's products, founders of small businesses, and value propositions are prominently highlighted on the homepage, along with stunning images of large businesses. Customer reviews are also used as social evidence.

Common Heir hp design

GRAV

GRAV

The theme of GRAV looks to be simple yet enjoyable. Although GRAV uses black and white as its brand colors, its homepage is made more vibrant by the use of vibrant backdrop colors and other design elements.

A movie that is included on GRAV's homepage also demonstrates how to use its products. A carousel of user evaluations of featured products and an email subscription option for GRAV's digital marketing are other crucial elements.

Hunterhue

Hunter Hue

Hunterhue is an art and jewelry brand that offers one-of-a-kind, artisan-made products. Its homepage design is plain and simple, enabling the products and art to take center stage.

Hunter Hue Collection

Users may select to browse the most recent highlighted collection or purchase accessories or art with ease. Users may access additional products, the website's About page, the contact form, or the shopping cart via the navigation bar.

Rowan

Rowan

Our next mini-case study of excellent homepage design examples is the dog care brand Rowan. To draw in online buyers, it makes use of cheerful, playful colors and adorable graphics. In reality, the hero picture is a video of a dog displaying its incredible hair, which was achieved by using Rowan's products.

Rowan for dogs

The Rowan website shows the customer star rating underneath the carousel of available products to further entice visitors to buy. Rowan also highlights positive press.

La Banasta

La Banasta

La Banasta‘s website promotes ecologically friendly cleaning products and household supplies. The homepage design includes stunning product images, clear CTA buttons, and an easy-to-use main menu.

La Banasta Homepage

La Banasta's homepage additionally emphasises its value propositions and why someone should support the brand.

La Banasta products

It categorises products to make it easier for users to browse for the items they're looking for.

La Banasta Kristal Acevedo

Finally, through presenting its genesis story, La Banasta appeals to people's emotions and fosters connection.

Ora Organic

Ora Organic

Ora Organic‘s homepage design is simple yet elegant, successfully segmenting users into two target audience groups: those who wish to shop for products independently and those who want product assistance. As a result, it encourages users to browse all items or take a quiz to help them decide which product is ideal for them.

Ora Organic shop

The homepage reiterates the brand's core propositions before giving users the option to shop or take the quiz.

Ora Organic subscription


Ora Organic offers its subscription-based alternative further down the page, followed by further evidence in the form of product tasting information and client testimonials.

Ora Organic testimonials


Dirty Labs is a brand of ecologically friendly laundry detergent with an equally clean website homepage. White, off-white, and soft colors quickly convey a friendly and welcoming vibe, as do clear navigational routes.

Dirty Labs

Dirty Labs

Dirty Labs is a brand of ecologically friendly laundry detergent with an equally clean website homepage. White, off-white, and soft colors quickly convey a friendly and welcoming vibe, as do clear navigational routes.

Dirty Labs review

Customer reviews add social proof to encourage users to convert.

Dirty Labs also makes use of some homepage real estate to educate consumers about its products and the ingredients that go into them. Then it emphasises press coverage before skillfully promoting certain products.

Dirty Labs highlights

BioLite Energy

BioLite Energy

BioLite Energy.png BioLite Energy provides portable, environmentally friendly cooking and lighting equipment. It highlights gorgeous product photography and strong calls to action on its homepage.

BioLite Energy products

BioLite's homepage also displays the impact it has on the community. Sharing this information urges the user to contribute to the cause by making a purchase.

BioLite Energy about

Improving your homepage design over time

As you are most likely aware, there is no one optimal approach to designing your homepage. User demographics, branding, user quantity, marketing channels, and other factors may all impact your goods' behavior in a variety of ways.

That is why it is critical to constantly see your homepage as a work in progress, using the traffic and revenue you produce to analyze the impact of your homepage and make modifications over time.

Homepage design FAQ

What should a good homepage look like?

1. Clear calls to action
2. Easy-to-use navigation menu
3. High-quality product imagery
4. Quick access to shopping cart

What should an effective homepage do?

1. Highlight your products
2. Introduce people to your brand
3. Reiterate your value proposition
4. Drive users to the next stage in the purchase process

What are some good examples of homepage design?

1. Benoa Swim
2. Common Heir
3. GRAV
4. La Banasta
5. PopSockets
6. Rowan
7. And more in this post

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4 Comments

  1. Hello! I’m at work surfing around your blog from my new iPhone 4! I just wanted to say I love reading through your blog and look forward to all your posts! carry on the excellent work!

  2. Hi, I think that I saw you visit my site, so I came to “return the favor.” I am trying to find things to enhance my site! I suppose it’s okay to use a few of your ideas!

  3. Thank you for sharing such a pleasant thought; the post is nice, which is why I read it completely. 

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