Your homepage has about 10 seconds
The first 10 seconds are when visitors are most likely to leave. Say what you do before they’re gone.
Visitors don’t read your homepage. They interrogate it, briefly, and plenty of them leave before you’ve finished clearing your throat.
Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen Norman Group wrote up a Microsoft Research study of visit durations on 205,873 web pages. The pattern was harsh: the first 10 seconds are when people are most likely to leave, the leaving only slows down markedly after about 30 seconds, and visitors who make it that far often stay two minutes or more. Nielsen’s conclusion: to earn several minutes of attention, you “must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.”
You can check this cheaply with a five-second test. Show your above-the-fold section to someone who has never seen it, hide it after five seconds, and ask what the product does and who it’s for. If they can’t say, the fix is in your headline, subhead and hero image, not your color palette.
The example
- Instead of
- “Stranger after 5 seconds: “Uh, some kind of AI platform for teams?””
- Try
- “Stranger after 5 seconds: “It records sales calls and writes the notes for you.””
Before you flush
Show your homepage to a friend for 5 seconds, hide it, and ask what you sell and who it’s for. Write down their exact words.