Part 3 - Website Optimization: Create a better homepage

Under 45% — Excellent Top performer. Visitors are exploring and engaging.

45–55% — Healthy Normal for cold/new traffic. No concern here.

55–65% — Average Expected with high new visitor volume.

65–75% — Below Average Worth investigating. Check traffic sources and page speed.

75%+ — Concerning Visitors leaving almost immediately. Needs attention.

• First, you want to highlight something using a slideshow or image banner. This will showcase your best seller, a new product or collection, or a sale. This section needs to include: A clear headline explaining what you sell, direct and strong benefit statement, a high quality product image, and a Shop Now button. This is the first thing people see, so you want it to easily communicate your right away. 

• Next, you want to showcase your best-selling collection. Do not forget to show the reviews on your homepage for these products. This needs to be clearly labeled Best Sellers or Customer Favorites. You want to showcase 4-8 products with the carousel feature. The goal here is to feature products that easily sell for your business and are established products with reviews. 

• Right after showing off your best-selling products, you want to share how you can help them based on their concern. This gives them a direct solution for their problem. For skincare brands, you can organize your collection list as “shop by concern” or “shop by skin type” and add your main collections. This helps to keep your website organized instead of having a bunch of random products throughout your homepage. 

• If the visitor made it this far down your homepage, they are still interested in learning more. As a small business, you want to introduce yourself and your mission. Most small businesses miss this opportunity because they want to showcase the products, but for a first-time visitor, they need to learn who you are and why they should care. So tell them. Do this by sharing a picture of yourself with products, or working in your business, and give them a few short sentences about your business and why it’s special. 

• Next, you want to showcase your reviews. It’s best to use an app like judge.me that can add the review section straight into your website, but if you don’t have this, or you are short on reviews, you can manually do this with Canva graphics or by adding special coding. 

• Following the reviews you should have a place to direct them to the next step. This could look like pointing them to take a quiz, or using a multi-column section to guide them to different collections of products based on their needs. 

• Lastly, you need to have a pop-up on your homepage to collect emails. You can usually do this through your website platform, but I recommend using an email marketing platform such as Klaviyo. Most visitors do not shop the first time. You need a way to stay in touch with them and encourage them to come back to your website.