12 Crucial Homepage Elements Every Website Homepage MUST Have Today

Your homepage is one of, if not the most important page on your site. Simply because it's the one that is most likely to receive the bulk amount of traffic you get. Whether organic traffic or traffic from some advertising campaign or something. So it's critical that your homepage is set up to convert as much of your traffic as possible into leads, clients and sales. And if you want your websites homepage to have more of an impact and convert your traffic into sales, or just have a much better conversion rate. Here's 12 crucial elements that every homepage should have today to maximize your chances of success!

1.  Headline
Your website needs to show what it's about and what it offers within 3 seconds of a person landing on it. You should then have a clear and concise headline that has no fluff! Keep it short, sweet and simple.

2. Sub-Heading
The sub-heading should just be a small description about what your site does or offer. You should avoid using gobbledygook here and and try to be different avoiding talking about yourself too much and try to be different and show value.

3. Benefits
It's important to describe what your site does, but also what the benefits to those things are. Your potential clients will likely want to know what the benefits and advantages are and by listing the benefits and advantages it lets people know they should use you!

4. Primary Call To Action's
It's important to have your primary call to actions above the fold of your site's homepage to drive conversions. You should provide 2-3 CTA's that link to the different stages of the buying cycle. Or if you don't have them, just link directly to your product/service with a CTA.

5. The Features
Your site's homepage should also boast of the features of your site/business as well as the benefits. You should list out some of the main features so that people will have a better understanding of the features of your products or services.

6. Customer Proof
One way to earn peoples trust is to show off your customer proof. That could be something as simple as listing out a few of your best customer quotes and feedback. If you put a name and a photo with those customer proofs you'll make those testimonials seem a lot more real!

7. Success Indicators
As well as adding some of your clients best feedback and testimonials, you can build even more trust and credibility to your site by placing any awards or recognition you've got that can be useful for creating a great first impression.

8. Navigation
The navigation of your site is something that should be easily accessible no matter what page they're on. But you should have a clear pathway to the rest of your site from your homepage through an easy to use navigation menu. That should be at the top of your site standard.

9. Supporting Images
People are visual beings. They live by sight. So instead of and as well as having all these other things in text format. Be sure to add some supporting images to your homepage that clearly show what it is you offer and or how it can help people. Just make sure they aren't stock or fake photos! Short videos are great to use for this reason too. 

10. Content Offering
To boost and improve conversion rates, instead of just using CTA's that ask/tell them to buy it now. Try to offer something free like a whitepaper, eBook or guide or something. That will help you to generate even more leads later on as well.

11. Resources
A high amount of people that visit your site aren't going to be ready to buy there and then. So you should provide links to more resources like your blog or posts on your blog that explain things in more detail such as the benefits and advantages etc so they can learn more about it.

12. Final Call To Actions
Most people scroll down to look at the whole website, and if you only have your CTA's at the top (above the fold) and not below it, then those that do aren't going to do much at all really. So you should not forget to include a CTA at the bottom of your site too to improve conversion rates.

And that's my 12 crucial elements every website homepage should have today to increase conversion rates!

What other homepage elements are there you know of that a website should have for this reason?

Thanks!

Mike.