The five sections every service business homepage needs

A homepage has one job. Not to describe your company, not to list your values, and definitely not to welcome anybody. Its job is to move a stranger one step closer to contacting you.

Judged against that, most service business homepages fail in the first two seconds, because they open with a sentence that could belong to any business in the country.

One: say what you do and who for

The first screen must answer three questions without scrolling. What is this. Is it for me. What do I do next.

"Delivering excellence since 2009" answers none of them. "Commercial electrical fit outs for Sydney warehouses and factories" answers all three, and it does something more valuable: it repels the wrong visitor. A homepage that speaks to everyone converts no one, because the reader cannot tell whether you have solved their specific problem before.

Be concrete. Name the service, name the customer, name the place if location matters to the buying decision.

Two: prove someone has trusted you

Directly under the headline, before you ask for anything. Logos of clients, a number of jobs completed, a licence or accreditation, a genuine testimonial with a real name attached.

This section exists because the visitor's default assumption is that you might not be real. Every unfamiliar business starts at zero credibility and the fastest way to move off zero is evidence that other people already took the risk.

One specific, verifiable proof point beats five vague ones. "Two hundred and forty homes across the Hills District" outperforms "trusted by hundreds of happy customers" every time, because the first sounds like a record and the second sounds like a slogan.

Three: name the problem before you sell the solution

People do not buy services, they buy the end of a problem. A section that describes the situation the reader is in right now, in their own words, does more selling than a feature list ever will.

The test is whether the reader thinks that you have described their exact situation. If your problem section could be lifted onto a competitor's site without editing, it is too general to do any work.

Only after the problem is named does the service description land, because now it is an answer rather than an advertisement.

Four: show how it works

Three or four steps. What happens after they contact you, what you need from them, when they see a result.

This section removes the single largest source of hesitation in service buying, which is not price. It is the fear of an unknown process. People delay contacting a business because they do not know what they are committing to, how long it takes, or whether they will be pressured.

Spelling out the sequence, including the parts that are free and the parts that are not, converts more visitors than another paragraph about your quality ever will.

Five: one clear action

One. Not a phone number, an email address, a contact form, a newsletter, a quote calculator and a chat widget competing for the same attention.

Pick the action you actually want. If your business closes on the phone, make calling the primary action and everything else secondary. If your work needs scoping first, make it a short form and ask only for what you genuinely need to respond, which is usually a name, a contact detail and a sentence about the job.

Every extra field costs you enquiries. Ask for a budget range at first contact and you will lose the people who have not worked out their budget yet, which includes most good clients.

Write it for a phone, held one handed, in a hurry

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often standing up, often comparing you to two competitors in other tabs. Every design decision should be tested in that context rather than on the wide monitor the site was built on.

That means short paragraphs, headings that carry meaning on their own, a tappable phone number, and a first screen that does not require scrolling to understand. It also means being ruthless about weight. A homepage that takes five seconds to appear on a suburban mobile connection has already lost a meaningful share of the people who clicked.

Test it with someone who does not know you

Show your homepage to a person outside your industry for five seconds, then take it away and ask them what the business does and who it is for. If they cannot answer both, the first screen has failed, and no amount of work further down the page will recover it.

This test costs nothing, takes a minute, and is more useful than most analytics dashboards, because it measures the only thing the top of a homepage is responsible for.

What to leave out

A carousel nobody clicks past the first slide of. A history of your company. Stock photography of people in glass meeting rooms. A mission statement. Anything that talks about you before you have earned the reader's attention by talking about them.

A homepage that does these five things in this order, quickly and on a phone, will outperform a far more attractive one that does not.