How users view the homepage

For many users, the home page is a place where, if they get lost, they can start their journey again. Users often want to return to a site’s home page to reorient themselves. We often see this happen during usability testing. For a business, the home page offers an opportunity to communicate their value to the world—particularly as it relates to their products and services. Therefore, ideally, a home page should reflect and balance business objectives and user needs.

Content home page should have

Those are the only two things users care about on a home page. (Lots of designers try to make the home page serve other functions, such as [telling] the user about things the organization cares about, but the user doesn’t—such as financial news about the business or what new products are on sale—but users blow right past this content and pay no attention to it. We’ve found it’s all a waste of valuable design resources.) When business owners focus on just these two things on the home page, users tell us the site is substantially more usable.