Most homepages try to do everything, so they do nothing well. We have built and rebuilt enough service-business sites to know that a small number of sections carry almost all the load, and the rest is usually decoration that gets in their way. Here are the five we build every site around, why each one earns its place, and the popular features we deliberately leave off. Where we quote a number it is linked to its source, and where the good research is overseas we say so.
1A headline that says what you do, who it is for, and where – with your phone number right there
A visitor gives your homepage seconds, not minutes. Nielsen Norman Group's analysis of how long people stay found that visitors decide whether to stay within roughly the first ten seconds, and leave inside ten to twenty if nothing holds them. They do not read much, either: across more than 45,000 page views, NN/g found people read about a fifth to a quarter of the words on a page. So the top of the page has one job – say what you do, who it is for and where, in a line.
NN/g's homepage guidance has been consistent for two decades: start with a tagline that summarises what the company does, especially if you are not famous, and their 2024 principles still put a clear value proposition first – what you do, plus your differentiator. "Wedding dance lessons in Sydney" beats "Creating unforgettable moments" every time.
Clarity is worth real money. In one financial-services test, stripping a page back to a single clear offer produced a 200% lift over the control; in another, a plain-benefit headline lifted sign-ups 10.44%. And put your phone number in the header, not buried on a contact page: Google's 2013 research with Ipsos found 70% of mobile searchers call a business directly from search results, and in the same study 36% said they would be more likely to explore other brands if there was no option to call.
2One main call to action, repeated, that says what happens next
Pick one thing you want a visitor to do – book a call, request a quote, ring you – and make it the obvious choice everywhere. Competing buttons split attention; the clarity test above is the same lesson in reverse, where removing the clutter around a single offer doubled conversion.
Label the button with what happens when it is clicked. NN/g's 2024 homepage principles are blunt about vague links like "Learn more" and "Click here" – "Book a 20-minute call" tells people exactly what they are getting. And keep the choices few. Hick's law is simply that more options take longer to decide, which on a homepage means a wall of equal-weight buttons is a wall of hesitation. That is a reason to simplify, not a conversion statistic – but the direction is clear.
3Proof, right where the decision happens: your rating, a few recent reviews, before-and-after photos
People check what others think before they call. In BrightLocal's 2024 survey of United States consumers, three in four read local-business reviews always or regularly, 71% would not consider a business rated below three stars, and 88% would use a business that replies to both positive and negative reviews, against 47% for one that replies to none. That is US data – the best recent Australian read is Yellow Pages' 2020 Social Media Report, where 68% said they read reviews or blogs to see what others think of a product or service.
You do not need hundreds of reviews. In the Spiegel Research Center's study of online reviews, the biggest jump in purchase likelihood came from moving from zero reviews to five, and – counter-intuitively – products rated 4.0 to 4.7 outsold ones with a perfect 5.0, which reads as too good to be true. That study is on e-commerce products, not local services, but the shape holds: a handful of genuine, recent, named reviews and a couple of honest before-and-after photos do more than a testimonial wall ever will.
4Your services – and what they cost, or at least how pricing works
Service businesses hate putting prices on the page. Buyers feel the opposite. In Clutch's survey of B2B buyers, one in four ranked transparent cost information as the single most important element of a services company's website; a more recent buyer report found 74% want clear pricing upfront and 69% named a lack of it among their biggest frustrations.
You do not have to publish a rate card. "From $X", a typical project range, or a plain explanation of how you quote all beat silence. Show the work rather than describe it – NN/g's homepage guidance is to show real examples instead of talking in the abstract – and write it in plain language. Across Unbounce's benchmark, professional-services landing pages convert at a median of 6.1%, and conversion falls as the reading gets harder. Those are paid-traffic landing pages rather than whole websites, so treat the figure as a direction, not a target.
5Real people, real credentials, real contact details
This is where trust is won or lost. Stanford's web-credibility research, built on studies with more than 4,500 people, says to show there is a real organisation behind the site, show the honest people who stand behind it, and make it easy to contact you.
Use real photos of your actual team. NN/g's eyetracking found people ignore stock photos of generic people, while at one company visitors spent 10% more time looking at real team portraits than at the bios beside them. It converts, too: in one MarketingExperiments test for a credit-counselling service, swapping a stock "headset woman" for the founder's real photo made visitors 35% more likely to book a consultation, and a United States removalist reported around US$10,000 a month more business after replacing stock images with photos of its own crew and trucks – a single client's account, but exactly the kind of proof a tradie can offer.
Then make the credibility signals easy to find: licence or registration numbers, insurance, your ABN, a service-area map, and contact details that work in one tap. Easy contact is itself a credibility signal, not just a convenience. The form itself deserves its own attention, and we have written separately about the contact-form mistakes that quietly cost enquiries.
And what we leave off
Hero carousels
They look busy and do very little. One university's analytics found only about 1% of homepage visitors ever click a carousel, and 84% of those clicks land on the first slide – so everything past the first slide is talking to almost nobody. NN/g advises no more than five frames and no auto-forward on mobile, agency tests have put a static hero at roughly three times the clicks of a slider, and carousels create real problems for keyboard and screen-reader users that markup cannot fully fix. A single strong hero beats a moving one.
Autoplaying video
It breaks people's sense of control. NN/g's principles say to avoid it without pause controls.
Testimonial walls
Attention drops sharply down the page – NN/g found people spend 57% of their viewing time above the fold and 74% within the first two screenfuls – and reviews hit diminishing returns after a handful, going by the Spiegel jump from zero to five. Three recent, named reviews near the top beat thirty in a graveyard at the bottom.
Competing calls to action, and decorative stock imagery
Both dilute the two things that actually convert: a clear next step, and evidence that you are real.
None of this is complicated. It is discipline – five sections, each doing one job, and the confidence to leave the rest off. That is how we build every site. If yours is carrying a carousel and a wall of stock photos instead, that is usually the cheapest thing to fix, and the first thing we would look at on a call.
Figures link to their original sources. Where the strongest research is from overseas we have said so; Australian consumer data on reviews and local search is thinner, and we would rather show the international figure with its country attached than dress it up as local.