The front door test
This week: your homepage. Three questions, three changes, and a way to check you actually fixed it.
Why the homepage, when it is the page you look at least
Because it is the page a stranger looks at first, and you stopped seeing it about two years ago.
You know what your business does, so you cannot read your own front door the way somebody arriving cold reads it. That is not carelessness. It is the curse of knowing your own thing too well. Every owner has it, including me.
So instead of trying to see it fresh, run a test that does not depend on you being objective.
The test, three questions, in this order
Open your homepage on your phone. Not your laptop, your phone, because that is where most people meet you. Do not scroll. Just look at what is on screen before you touch anything.
One. Does it say what you actually do, in the words a stranger would use?
Not your tagline. Not your mission. What you do, for whom. If a person who has never heard of you cannot answer “what is this” out loud within about five seconds, the front door is shut. The trap is language: you use the words your industry uses, your buyer uses the words their problem uses, and yours lose.
Two. Do your different buyers get different doors?
Most small businesses serve two kinds of customer who want completely different things. A trainer sells to individuals and to companies. A clinic sells to patients and to referrers. If both land on the same page and get the same next step, one of them is being served badly, and usually it is the more valuable one.
Three. Does the first click go to the thing they can buy?
Or does it go to another page that explains more, which leads to another page that explains more. Every page between arriving and buying is a place to leave. Count the clicks from your homepage to the point where money changes hands. More than two is your number to beat.
What to actually build this week
Not a redesign. Three changes to one page.
- Replace whatever is at the top with a plain sentence that says what you do and who it is for. Boring is better than clever here, because clever needs decoding and nobody decodes on a phone.
- Put two buttons under it, one for each kind of buyer, in their language rather than your internal names for them. Not “Services” and “About.” Closer to “I want to learn this myself” and “I want you to do it for my team.”
- Point each button at the page where that person can actually act. Not a category page. The page with the thing on it.
A couple of hours in whatever your site is built on, and you do not need a developer for any of it.
How to check you actually fixed it
Send the link to one person who does not know what you do. A friend outside your industry, a relative, anyone. Ask them one question: what does this business do, and what would you click?
If they answer both without hesitating, you are done. If they pause on either, their pause tells you exactly which of the three questions you have not answered yet. It costs one message and it is more honest than any tool.
One number, before you go
Across 2,241 companies audited for how fast they reply to an enquiry, the average first response took 42 hours. Nearly a quarter never replied at all.
Fixing your front door means more people knock. Which is only useful if somebody answers. That is issue two.
Written by Oyekola Obajuwon, who builds websites, runs campaigns and automates the boring parts for small businesses.
Source for the 42 hours: Harvard Business Review, 2011, Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, 1.25 million leads across 42 companies.
