Design

What Every Successful Homepage Needs: A Comprehensive Checklist for 2025

January 30, 2025
By Pam Berg

Your brand’s online presence hugely determines your ability to attract your target audience and convert new customers. Regardless of what specific business goals you’re going after in 2025, investing in your website, social media marketing, and content distribution channels will be essential for reaching those goals.

Naturally, all your digital assets need to present your business in the best possible light. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that your homepage could be the first place your prospects interact with your brand once they enter the sales funnel. Not convinced? Consider the nature of the typical buyer’s journey.

According to consumer behavior research, product and brand discovery happens predominantly online.

A survey conducted in November 2023 found that 41% of people (and 50% of those younger than 45) began their purchase journeys by browsing online. Moreover, a 2024 study identified search engines as the most prominent channel for brand/product discovery, with 33% of shoppers finding solutions to their needs via a Google search.

This data doesn’t necessarily point toward your homepage as the only digital space you need to engage and impress potential buyers. But it shows that you can expect approximately one-third of your prospects to have their first serious brand interaction on the opening page of your website. You need to invest in its optimization to maximize its effectiveness at nurturing leads and converting customers.

To help you do this, here’s a comprehensive checklist of everything a successful homepage needs in 2025.

1. Instant Trust Indicators

In a global landscape of ever-declining trust, earning your prospects’ confidence is key to turning them into loyal customers. Partly because 88% of people actively choose to buy from brands they trust.

With this in mind, it’s essential that your website — and your entire online presence, for that matter —  establishes your brand’s competence and trustworthiness. Because people form first impressions about brands in as little as a blink of an eye, the best way to do this is to enhance your homepage with instant trust indicators.

Of course, the optimal way to employ trust signals will depend on your target audience.

When targeting end consumers, aim to enrich your homepage, landing pages, and online presence with straightforward trust signals. These can include reviews, ratings, awards, and certifications. You can also take inspiration from Armra and support your unique value proposition with custom badges.

The brand’s homepage includes several confidence-boosting badges highlighting that the product is “physician founded, research-backed,” includes “400+ bioactive nutrients,” “grass-fed,” and more.

On the other hand, getting B2B prospects to perceive your business as trustworthy may take a slightly more proof-based approach. To optimize your homepage (or online presence in general) for this type of buyer, explore opportunities to use real-life data to support your claims.

For instance, MISIM includes a scrolling “clients” element on its homepage. This approach is an excellent solution design-wise, considering that the brand’s audience is already familiar with corporations such as Shell or the De Beers Group. Moreover, they are likely to perceive MISIM as competent and trustworthy due to its history of successfully working with such prosperous clients.

2. Instant Enticing Product Access

Creating and smartly positioning attractive value propositions can effectively capture prospect attention. But at the same time, it’s not always enough to convince buyers that your product has genuine potential to remove their pain points.

This is true for two reasons.

First and foremost, today’s consumers demand an exceptional customer experience. And the best way to give them what they want is through efficiency, convenience, and quality support.

Secondly, buyers are becoming increasingly risk-averse. This explains (at least partly) why sales cycles are getting longer by the year.

By including instant product access on your homepage, you can overcome these two conversion obstacles and shorten the buyer’s journey. For this strategy to work, it needs to include two things: 

  1. Actual product access, which allows prospects to evaluate your solution and its value. 
  2. The interaction must be quick and easy to start to prevent last-minute conversion obstacles.

For inspiration on how to do this, check out AI Humanize. This brand targets students who require affordability and proof of effectiveness. To ensure it doesn’t lose their attention, the brand turns the most prominent part of its homepage into a usable web app. By pointing out that it is free to use, AI Humanze effectively encourages product interactions and (thanks to the product’s usefulness) maximizes the chances of its prospects converting into long-time customers.

If you sell a complex solution — especially if it’s made for B2B users — you might not be capable of demonstrating its full capacity with a web app. In these cases, the best thing you can do is create an appealing and user-friendly access point to your demos or free trials.

For example, Ortto makes it exceptionally easy for its target audience to interact with its automation and analytics solutions. The hero section of its homepage includes a helpful explainer video. It also smartly highlights a “Book a demo” CTA, which is made more enticing with microcopy promising a 14-day free trial with a 2-minute onboarding process. 

Note that this strategy isn’t just a great way to enhance your homepage. It can work just as well on your landing pages and conversion-oriented social posts.

3. Striking Visuals Depicting Your Products at Their Best

Visuals are exceptionally effective at growing your brand and inspiring conversions. The reason is simple — people are naturally drawn to aesthetically pleasing webpage elements. Plus, they process visuals much faster than words, making imagery the perfect tool for capturing their attention.

Every aspect of your online presence, including your homepage, should use visuals in a way that will attract and speak to your audience and, hopefully, inspire them to convert.

One way to do this — specifically for ecommerce brands — is to invest in product imagery that will replace an in-store shopping experience. Focus on high-quality product photos that show off your offer from multiple angles. And consider investing in interactive UI features, such as advanced zoom options, 360-degree views, and virtual try-ons.

If the value you offer is more challenging to capture, you might invest in emotionally loaded visuals to distribute throughout your digital channels. This can include photos depicting aspirational situations or events that make your audience feel emotionally connected to your brand’s solutions.

For instance, the Eden Emerald Buyers Agent homepage is loaded with breathtaking photos of properties. The page features a “Latest Purchases” section at the bottom, with embedded Instagram posts showing off the properties the brand has helped its clients buy. This strategy puts web visitors into the mindset of imagining themselves in similar properties, significantly increasing their purchase intent and willingness to convert.

What’s great about this approach is that it works just as well when targeting B2B buyers as it does for B2C.

If you check out WeWork, you’ll notice that the company adopts the same strategy, using aspirational visuals to show the results it can provide to professional users who opt to solve their workspace needs through the brand.

4. Brand Relatability Messages

Proving your brand’s authority and trustworthiness often isn’t enough to differentiate your business. In a global landscape where brand values and personality play a huge role in consumers’ purchase decisions, your best bet of winning over customers may lie in demonstrating your relatability.

But how does relatability (or emotional connection, for that matter) impact purchase decisions? Well, research indicates that forging and nurturing a feeling of connectedness with your audience offers multiple benefits. It makes it easier to engage your prospects (especially as emotional cues impact a significant portion of shopping decisions). Brands that build relationships with their customers also see increased growth, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

With this in mind, explore opportunities to enhance your online presence — and your homepage — with relatability messages.

For inspiration on how you can do this, check out Tree Island. The founders behind this brand strongly emphasize their humanity, pointing out that they’re “a microbiologist and health foodie dedicated to the art and science of good food.”

To engage B2B prospects, you can adjust this approach to demonstrate the humanity of your team. Or, even better, you can do something similar to Bentobox and highlight your brand’s relatability via customer relationships. Note how proudly this SaaS company emphasizes its role in making users’ lives easier, demonstrating its dedication to delivering a satisfactory CX.

5. A Short, Effective Explainer Video

Product understanding is essential for converting new customers — especially for unconventional or innovative products your target audience may not be familiar with. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to helping your audience comprehend the value you offer.

Video represents one of the best formats for elevating product understanding and inspiring conversions.

Data from Wyzowl shows that 87% of buyers purchased an item after watching a short explainer video. Moreover, 98% of consumers sought out explainers to learn more about products and services.

Now, in addition to investing in video marketing to attract and engage your audience, consider producing resources that will help you explain how your solutions benefit potential customers. Then, do your best to include these resources on pages likely to attract awareness-stage prospects, including landing pages, social media channels, and your site’s homepage.

The best way to employ video will depend on whether you’re a B2C or B2B business (and your target audience’s needs, preferences, and expertise).

For example, Tempo does this with a combination of super-short videos and GIFs, using these resources to illustrate how its innovative product works. By explaining how its solution tracks repetitions, heart rate, range of motion, and form, the brand effectively demonstrates how its product offers the same benefit as a real-life coach at a fraction of the price.

Topview, on the other hand, knows that its B2B prospects have a clear set of expectations regarding what they need. That’s why it includes several short explainer videos on its homepage. The videos guide web visitors through the top benefits of investing in its AI Video Editor solution, such as the ability to create promotional videos, product marketing videos, and seasonal content.

6. Visual Breathing Room

When it comes to design strategies that can elevate the conversion potential of your homepage (or website in general), negative space should be a non-negotiable.

Decluttering your website creates a more focused and appealing online presence. The smart use of white space also enhances your digital assets by optimizing them to accentuate core messages and important functional elements.

So, if you’re looking for an easy way to upgrade your homepage’s ability to appeal to potential buyers, consider doing a bit of decluttering.

Adding visual breathing room to your homepage does not have to equal an extremely minimal web presence. Instead, think of going in a direction similar to Deetken. This brand’s site is designed in a way that highlights value propositions and calls to action while removing distracting clutter. By doing this, the business prioritizes conversions by allowing high-value elements to stand out from the background, without having to vie for user attention with unnecessary design choices.

7. Measurable Claims and Expertise Signals

What’s the most effective way to communicate to your audience that you offer relevant value? When trying to reach them via social media or search, the best way to do this is to address their pain points head-on.

This strategy allows you to show you understand your prospects’ needs (which is what consumers want from brands in the first place). Moreover, it allows you to describe how you can help remove their pain points.

When optimizing your website or homepage, keep in mind that you’re not working with limited real estate. You have plenty of space to go into the nitty-gritty of what you offer.

In other words, when looking at ways to elevate your homepage design in a way that will boost conversions, consider supporting your claims with measurable data and expertise signals that will cement your brand’s authority, competence, and trustworthiness.

For inspiration on how to do this, check out Christensen Law. By citing stats and winnings from previous personal injury cases, this brand uses its positive track record to establish its expertise with real-life data.

And you can adjust this tactic to work for B2B as well. 

If you look at the Transitions Elite homepage, you’ll see that the brand visually highlights dollar figures in the “Read Real Results” section. This elevates the trustworthiness of the displayed social proof and adds a layer of value to the brand’s offer. It makes it clear that Transitions Elite is a serious business that can deliver serious outcomes for its customers.

8. Instant Entry Into Your Sales Funnel

We mentioned that the sales cycle is gradually getting longer, especially for B2B sales. And, objectively speaking, that’s not that big of a surprise.

Buyers have a ton of available choices. But they’re becoming more careful with their purchase evaluations as well. In fact, if you look at the average sales cycle length in 2024, you’ll find that many organizations spend between 70 and 162 days from first contact to purchase.

The data supports the importance of investing in high-quality, purchase-inspiring content for the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. Nonetheless, some shoppers will already be ready to enter the sales funnel and will subconsciously want to speed up the sales process.

If you’re looking at which elements your homepage needs to convert new customers, ensure you include enough CTAs that provide instant entry into the sales funnel.

For B2C, the solution to this will be to feature classic “Shop now” calls to action throughout your homepage. In B2B you obviously have a slightly lower chance of inspiring impulse purchases. However, you can encourage prospects to contact your sales team, which can significantly shorten the purchase process.

See how Axis Insurance does it in the hero section of its homepage. By inviting visitors to “Get an insurance quote,” the brand effectively encourages conversions while keeping the risk factor to an absolute minimum.

9. Incentives to Navigate the Rest of the Website

Exploring opportunities to shorten the sales cycle offers tremendous benefits. But it’s still important to ensure your homepage appeals to all potential customers — including those who are not yet ready to convert.

For this segment of your audience, your goal isn’t to force them toward converting. Instead, it’s to encourage them to continue interacting with your brand so that they can naturally discover reasons to invest in your solutions.

One way your website homepage can do this is by presenting visitors with attractive incentives to navigate multiple pages.

For one of the best B2C examples out there, check out Glossier. Knowing that risk-averse shoppers may not be willing to buy, this brand uses a special offer element to encourage visitors to visit a product collection page. By offering 20% off, Glossier not only presents prospects with an attractive reward for shopping, but also gives them an enticing incentive to browse products. This significantly increases their chances of finding something they’d want to have.

Of course, there are much simpler ways to do this. B2B brand Moo, for instance, uses menu copy to incentivize navigation. By presenting web visitors with distinct product categories, Moo effectively encourages prospects to check out the brand’s solutions and evaluate whether they could be the answer to their needs.

10. Personalized Interactive Elements

Lastly, as you explore opportunities to enhance the effectiveness of your homepage with strategic elements, don’t forget about the allure of personalization.

After all, consumers expect brands to deliver exceptional shopping experiences. More importantly, 81% prefer to buy from businesses that go above and beyond to meet their unique needs.

The best way to build a more enjoyable buyer’s journey for your prospects is to encourage your sales and customer support teams to treat each prospect individually. However, you can achieve similarly positive effects by investing in website homepage elements that do this semi-automatically.

For example, quiz elements on ecommerce sites, like the “Find your treatment” CTA on the Curology homepage, are a marvelous way to optimize the browsing experience to align with your prospects’ unique wants and needs.

When targeting B2B users (or when selling complex products), you may want to go a step further in helping them receive personalized information. 

In this case, explore methods to emphasize customer experience elements on your homepage. It can be as simple as including a link to a relevant calculator in your hero section, as Unbound Solar did in the example below. You can even include these interactive features on your homepage, to give visitors access to instant personalized answers.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, enhancing your homepage’s effectiveness at engaging and converting new customers doesn’t have to be complicated. Including the elements discussed in this article promises tremendous returns. 

Don’t hesitate to experiment with the strategies outlined — especially if you feel they may benefit your potential clients and ease or shorten their buyer’s journey.

John Hurley

John Hurley is a marketing consultant, freelance writer and professional geek. He loves overdelivering to his mostly SaaS & e-commerce clients. And romantic comedies are his not-so-guilty pleasure.