The homepage of your Magento store is the storefront, which should be well-design, easy to navigate, and display the information your customers expect to see. The homepage creates the first impression of your store. And it’s very important to give a good first impression on your customers. Otherwise, they will just bounce off your website.
The bounce rate for an eCommerce and retail website should be between 20-45%. If you want to improve the bounce rate of your website, then your homepage should encourage visitors to take action. And If you can’t encourage them, then they leave the site, which would increase the bounce rate.
Even though the customers are more likely to land on your category or product page from search engines, the homepage remains the most important and most visited page of your eCommerce store. The homepage of your website creates some expectations for buyers that you have to fulfill by offering valuable deals and products. And to help you with that, we have come up with a guide of best practices for Magento homepage design.
Best Practices to Design Your Magento Store’s Homepage
Display your Unique Selling Point (USP)
Display your unique selling point straight away. This USP may motivate visitors to stay on your homepage a bit longer and purchase the items they are looking for. A well-planned USP is what differentiates you from your competitors. And not displaying it on the homepage is a big mistake you can make.
The USP of your store gives you credibility, which motivates your customers to buy from you rather than going to hundreds of other stores. The USP of your store should outline the message you want to convey about the products you are selling on your Magento eCommerce store.
If you don’t have a unique selling point, then create one. It’s not that hard. You just have to think about innovative and inspiring things about your brand that sets you apart from the others. Things like solving a unique problem, offering a better quality product or service than others, benefits your customers, would not find anywhere else, etc. can help form a USP of your website.
Also, you can ask your past customers about their experience with your services and products, which may help you to create a prominent USP that you can display on your eCommerce.
Have an appealing Sale Section
Promoting your sales offer can generate big revenues for your Magento eCommerce store. Here, you aim to promote sales as much as possible and the best way to do that is by positioning the sales page uniquely on your homepage. The visitors must find the sales page and offers as easily as possible when they enter your website.
Put up the sale page on the header menu, where it will be easier for visitors to navigate and reach the page. You can try different ways to highlight that sale page, for example assigning different colors or using a different font for the header menu only for the sale page.
Whichever way you do it, it will increase the sale and revenue from your homepage and decreases the rate of bounce.
Implement a Prominent Search Bar
A search bar is one handy tool for visitors to search for their favorite product on your website. Once a customer lands on your Magento store’s homepage, they will likely find the product by going into the navigation menu or they may take a short cut and search the product instead.
The visitors who use the search functionality on your website are 3 times more likely to buy the product they searched for. Because with the use of a search bar your visitors can find whatever the product they want in a matter of seconds directly from the homepage.
The search bar should appear more eloquently on the homepage so that customers don’t have to go through the trouble of finding it. Write up a creative note inside the search bar that encourages customers to use it.
Also, implement the autocomplete feature for the ease of the use. The feature makes the search accurate by completing it without visitors having to type the whole thing. Also, make the search bar appear on all the pages of your website and not only on the homepage for customers’ ease of use.
Show Key Elements First Thing on Homepage
There are certain things visitors check before they make any kind of purchase from your Magento store. This information could influence their purchase decision to buy from you or not. Many visitors want to know the return policies, shipping policies, etc. before they make a purchase.
This kind of information motivates visitors to make a buying decision. Place these elements on the homepage of your website where it would be easy for visitors to find them that drives them to purchase more. Because this would definitely work in your favor.
Personalize the Homepage
Personalization is the key for eCommerce stores like Magento to survive in this fierce competition. The personalized recommendation can create more sales than any other technique. You can also, use AI-based tools like chatbots for smart and personalized recommendations.
To personalize the shopping experience of your customers, you can use their past purchasing habits, behavior on your website, or their browsing history. Personalization has the potential to increase the sale as well as the lifetime value of the customers. A personalized recommendation makes customers return to your store more often rather than other things. Because they feel that you understand their needs and wants more precisely.
For that matter, Amazon has mastered the art of personalizing the shopping experience of its customers. Learn from Amazon and implement somethings similar to your Magento store’s homepage. Here’s what you can do, show customers related items, upsell similar items from their past purchase, or sell items already in their cart. All these provide you an opportunity to increase sales and conversion.
Make Navigation as Simple as Possible
Many visitors don’t have any specific items in their minds so what they do is wander around on your homepage and look for interesting products or a category page. And simple navigation helps them to do that quickly. It gives them product ranges to look at and buy and if they don’t find the product that interests them, they might leave your site.
The navigation menu should include if not all, the top-selling categories of your Magento store. And should be located at the top of the homepage for easy access to visitors. Doing so will provide a wide overview of what kind of products you are selling on your Magento store.
You can also implement little things like an arrow pointing downward, which indicates that the menu has some hidden contents. All these make visitors navigate from the homepage simple and easy.
Implement Mobile-First Design
Mobile devices are dominating the eCommerce world today. As per one Statista report, 53% of the global website traffic comes only from mobile devices. So, you should design your website’s homepage that better adapts to the mobile screen sizes. Also, mobile commerce will account for more than 70% of the eCommerce sales by the year 2021.
All of these indicate that mobile commerce is the next big thing for the eCommerce industry. Because more and more people are drawn towards shopping online with ease of mobile devices. Therefore, it is essential for you to implement a mobile-first design. There are certain elements like CTA buttons and navigation menus, which should increase the mobile-friendliness along with responsiveness.
Conclusion
Most visitor when land on your website’s homepage, they have expectations to see something that may interest them. Lure them with your USP and value proposition so that they don’t bounce off of your website. The above-mentioned best practices help you to optimize the homepage design for your Magento store. Still, you can consult an eCommerce expert if you need help with the Magento homepage design. Or you can hire a Magento developer who will optimize and design your Magento store’s homepage by following the best practices.
