Anyone can put up a website. But websites with the best homepage designs do really well for both their target customers and visitors. 

As a business owner, you need to put an emphasis on your website since it acts as your 24/7 storefront. The average attention span of an adult is 8.25 seconds, which is why you need to make a good first impression with your website. 

With 42% of people leaving a website due to poor functionality, finding a way to keep them hooked is a must. Through good homepage design, you can help increase your bounce rate, lower conversion rates, and improve your site’s SEO and performance. 

10 Factors that Influence Best Homepage Designs in 2024

So what are the best practices to follow when trying to capture your customers’ attention on your website? Here are 10 important things to consider when designing your homepage for 2024. 

Brand Identity

Building your brand’s identity cements your logo, typography, colour palette, and other assets across your business. They are the visual elements that your target customers and past customers use to identify your brand among your rivals. 

You need to build your brand consistently and intentionally. Do more than your brand’s aesthetics so you can increase credibility and trust in your business. 

Image Credit: Lean-Labs

In the example, Planet Fitness has executed its branding consistently across its website and social media channels. They have used a recognisable colour scheme for both their advertising and digital channels.  

Apart from their aesthetics, the gym has been consistent in their positioning. They present themselves as an accessible, friendly, and approachable gym; which is clear with their homepage copy and social media profiles. 

First time customers who encounter the brand’s print or social media posts, get to associate the brand with the gym. 

When it comes to building your brand identity, you will need to analyse your business, target audience, and market positioning. This encompasses several factors including the following:

1. Know Your Target Audience

Image Credit: SproutSocial

The first step is to identify your potential customers and customise an experience built for them. You can achieve this through: 

• Audience analysis: Look into your target demographics (age range, gender, location, and socioeconomic status) and psychographics (interests, aspirations, and lifestyle choices)
• Client research: Learn more about the people who previously bought your product or service. This tells you who they are and why they picked your brand.
• Competitor analysis: Check out the social media and website of your competitors to see how they position their own brand. 

2. Identify Your Colour Palette

Image Credit: Trevor Blount Pilates

Choose the right colour palette for your website and incorporate these into your strategy. Shape the perceptions of your website traffic to prompt them to take action. A study revealed that brands that consistently use their website colours increase their brand recognition rate by up to 80%.

The best practices to create an appealing colour palette for your brand include: 

• Consider colour theory: Take a look at the different colour themes that are being used by websites with best homepage designs. Find a good colour combination that works best with your brand by studying the meanings behind certain colours. 
• Consider contrasting colours: While following a colour palette is a good idea to get started, it would also be good to play around with highly contrasting colours. These can help improve your website’s readability and accessibility. 
• Opt for the 60/30/10 rule: Another good practice to start with is to use the 60/30/10 rule when choosing a selection for your colour palette. Choose one primary colour that 60% of your website will use. The secondary colour you need to use should only take up 30% of the site. Lastly, the third colour should only make up 10% and should only be used as a contrasting or complementary accent colour. 

The website, Trevor Blount Pilates, has carefully executed their chosen colour palette. Although the colours are contrasting, they do not negatively affect each other. The website also uses the 60/30/10 rule with how it chose the colours: cream is the primary colour, black as the secondary, and red as its accent colour. 

The result is a harmonious look of the elements on the website, which gives focus on the brand’s website title and image. 

3. The Right Font Matters Too 

Image Credit: The New Yorker

Your website’s typography should also be carefully considered. Things like the site’s font style, appearance, size, and structure can affect the look of the website and add to a customer’s experience. 

Here are some important things to take into consideration:

• Limit the number of fonts you use: A website that uses too many font styles will look unprofessional. The best practice is to stick with a couple of options to maintain consistency. The widely-used sans-serif font online is Arial.
• Opt for web-safe fonts: One thing to remember about picking the right font is that they often won’t work with some browsers and devices. These fonts need to be downloaded and installed on every computer to work. Instead, look for web-safe fonts to stay consistent across browsers. 
• Follow size and structure: Keep your website text to the minimum standard size of 16 pixels or 12 pt and use 50-75 characters per line. Adding more characters to this count will cause your readers to be bored easily. You can use online tools to help look at your text style when choosing the right style to use.

A good example of typography used on a website can be spotted on The New Yorker, a traditional and established magazine that has taken its presence digital. The brand carries its signature font into its online and print mediums, making use of only a few font variations. 

User Experience

Image Credit: Experience Dynamics

Your website should focus on user experience by making it easy to navigate. A good practice is to have clear and obvious navigation and buttons to allow your website visitors to explore your content on their own without overwhelming them.

Some best practices to follow include: 

1. Easy Navigation 

Image Credit: JustinMind

People are visual creatures. They like to look at pretty things and are usually attracted by high-quality graphics. When building your website, you need to make it easy for your audience to browse through your pages. Some useful tips include:

• Use clear language: While it’s recommended for individuals to find their voice and be unique in their brand, it can also be good to use simple and recognisable terms when it comes to your site’s navigation. Go for the use of classic terms like “About”, “Contact Us”,  or “Services” when trying to convey a message. Changing these standard terms could confuse your visitors. 
• Customise your navigation: For websites with heavy content, be clearer and more detailed in your navigation. Meanwhile, if you have limited content, you can use a few navigation links. 
• Use breadcrumbs: These help keep track of where a user is on your website. They can easily retrace their steps and go back to a previous page when the information overwhelms them. 

2. Mobile-First Approach

Image Credit: Hubspot

The number of people using mobile devices to access websites has grown to 58.67% in 2023. This means you should not make mobile-responsiveness an afterthought of your website design, but a priority. 

Since there are a few restrictions when designing a website for mobile, you have to make sure you optimise the user experience. Some important tips to keep note of include: 

• Prioritise important content: With limited screen real estate, you need to make sure your visitors easily find what they’re looking for on your site. 
• Use intuitive navigation: Let your mobile users have an easier time to navigate your site by using an intuitive menu, like a hamburger button. This is a familiar option that many websites use and also doesn’t use too much space. You can also add a search bar so users can easily search for things on your site. 
• Minimise disruptive pop-ups: You always want to keep your mobile visitors happy with their experience using your site. One way you can achieve this is to reduce disruptive pop-up ads. Instead of closing the pop-up, users may accidentally click on these. As a result, they have an unpleasant experience with your site. 
• Conduct testing: Google has a native Mobile-Friendly Test tool to allow website owners to check if a site is mobile-friendly. 

The mobile version of The Huffington Post has followed these best practices down to a tee. As a news outlet, their website is full of text and images. But for users on mobile devices, the publication has condensed its content to best fit mobile screen dimensions. 

They have also used the hamburger menu option to keep their site free of excess text and clutter.  

3. Intuitive Design

Image Credit: Kulnari

Reading blocks of text is no longer a practice that websites with the best homepage designs use. Web developers know that web users have shorter attention spans and do not prefer text-heavy content. Instead, they opt for visually engaging elements (photos, videos, and illustrations) to paint them a story they can easily digest.  

Some ways you can incorporate this into your homepage design is to follow these tips:

• Take note of image formats: There are image formats that cause a website to load slowly and poorly. Make sure you are uploading WebP image formats since they are up to 50% smaller than JPEG files. While they keep the same quality, they also support alpha and transparency, making them a better alternative to PNG files. 
• Be careful with carousels: Carousels are great if you want a visually appealing yet professional website. But make sure you keep each slide simple and relevant so they do not cause distracting or look like ads. 
• Choose responsive images and videos: Opting for responsive images and videos helps ensure that the content you upload gets displayed properly regardless of the device’s screen size. 

Kulnari’s website gives website visitors a unique experience. In just a few words, the website already manages to give users an idea of what they are offering: the world’s first mystery golf experience in Singapore. 

The website uses visuals to tell the story, yet answers the questions that website visitors need information on. 

4. Call-to-Action (CTA)

Image Credit: Quay House

The call-to-action (CTA) is an important aspect you should not forget to include in your website. It tells your visitors to take action and interact with your site. 

Here are some best practices to include in placing CTAs on your site: 

• Make it stand out: The CTA button should stand out from the rest of your content. You can do this by choosing a contrasting colour and directing your visitors’ eyes to the whitespace. 
• Position it above-the-fold: Based on research, CTAs placed above-the-fold have helped boost conversions by as much as 317%. You don’t have to wait until the end of your page to offer your CTA. 
• Know what tempts your audience: The CTA should be personalised to what your website visitor looks for. HubSpot has identified that personalised CTAs perform 202% better compared to the basic CTAs like “Join Now” or “Sign Up Now”. You can use customer surveys or Google Analytics to look for information on what your site visitors need. 

Quay House SG has strategically placed its CTA on the top right portion of the screen. It also stands out since it rotates in a circle, catching the eyes of the website visitor. They have also answered a common information that visitors are looking for on the site, leading to an increase in table reservations.

5. Accessibility

Image Credit: The Webby Awards

Another best practice to keep in mind when designing websites for 2024 is to make the homepage accessible by everyone, including those with visual, motor, auditory, speech, or cognitive disabilities. 

Unfortunately, the number of websites considered accessible is less than 5%. You can change this by following these tips:

• Opt for contrasting colours: Website visitors with visual impairments have difficulty discerning text from the background if the colours do not contrast too much. A good rule of thumb is to have a 4.5:1 normal text and 4:1 large text minimum contrast. 
• Support navigation with a keyboard: Make your website “scrollable” through the “Tab” button on a keyboard. This helps people with visual impairment, motor disabilities, and other disabilities visit your site.
• Add alternative text (alt text): Include a written description of the visual assets you include on your website. This way, visually impaired users can still understand the visual content included on your page.  

The Webby Awards has picked The Impossible Bedtime Story and Daniel’s Music Foundation as the winners of its Accessible Technology Websites and Mobile Sites in 2024 for “exemplifying building accessibility above and beyond compliance standards.” 

There are plenty of tools you can use to check a website’s accessibility. 

SEO

Image Credit: Smart Insights

Anyone who tells you that SEO is dead in 2024 is lying. Even with the advent of AI, you have to pay close attention to your website’s SEO and optimise it with the best practices. By doing this, you can help your website gain a higher placement on the search engine results page. 

Some best practices include:

1. Optimise Site Speed

Image Credit: Wix

A website that loads longer than three seconds will quickly lose the interest of 40% of visitors. This is why you need to practise the right SEO tips on how you can improve your site speed. 

You can follow these tips:

• Minify your code: Remove characters and lines that are not necessary in your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files. 
• Allow browser caching: Allow caching so that browsers don’t have to retrieve your files from the server. 
• Compress images: High-quality images can lead to a slow load time. Make sure you have optimised your photos by using the right file format and size. 

Tools like Google Search Console can help check the speed of your website and if there is anything you need to work on. You can make the most out of this tool by entering our website and checking the metrics that can contribute to page load time. 

2. Drive Traffic

Image Credit: Ahrefs

Drive traffic to your website by following these SEO best practices:

• Include a meta description: Having an engaging meta description helps encourage potential visitors to click on your website. This will bring more organic traffic to your site.
• Focus on keywords: Although keywords don’t have as much importance as they used to, it is still a good practice to include them in your website content. You can also include the keyword in your URL slug so that search engines can locate and understand your content better. 
• Opt for long-tail keywords: These days, search engines prioritise websites that focus specifically on user needs instead of generic terms. The best way you can adhere to this practice is by using long-tail keywords. 
• Acquire backlinks from high-quality sites: Your website gains authority when a high performing site links to it. These links will draw in new users and increase your traffic too. 

No matter how well-built your website is, it won’t do its job if it is not getting any traffic. Imagine you have a business at Marina Bay Sands and you’ve glammed up your storefront to attract shoppers looking for an aesthetic business. Without traffic, your business will crumble in just a few months. 

This is reflective of how important SEO is to a website. By drawing traffic to your website, you get potential customers to take notice of what you are selling. If there is an intent to purchase, they will do so. 

Why You Need to Pay Attention to Best Homepage Designs in 2024

Following these 2024 tips can help improve your homepage design and attract potential audiences. This is the best way you achieve your goals through your website. 

Call us today to take a look at the best homepage designs we’ve created for our previous clients. 

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I make my homepage designs look good? 

Following the best practices for optimising websites in 2024 can help make your site look good. Some of the best tips include keeping your site minimalistic and free of clutter, creating easy-to-read content, staying mobile-friendly, and having an easy-to-navigate site.  

What is the ideal homepage designs? 

An ideal homepage designs should have visually organised elements that are similar to other sites. This includes a “hero” screen with a call-to-action, some visuals on either site, and minimalistic content.

What is important on homepage designs ? 

Your homepage should be able to communicate what website visitors need in a matter of seconds. Make sure to include a clear description of your services or products so visitors know they have found the right page. 

How do I make an engaging homepage designs?

The surefire way to make your homepage designs engaging is to understand your target audience. You also need to include headlines to make your content skimmable, especially for people-on-the-go. Lastly, your website should be mobile-friendly so it can be accessed by more people.