A common occurrence and necessity is to spend more time working on the home page compared to other pages of a website. Many experts will tell you that you can’t forget your other content, and smartly so. Search engines like Google sees each page of your site uniquely, and your contact page could actually bring in more visitors than your home page. This is all often the case, but I wanted to know by how much.

So I did a little study using Google Analytics reports from ten different sites. The sites are completely random in industry, and in type.

The Findings from Ten Websites

Of the ten sites, seven of them had the home page as the most viewed. On average the home page was responsible for 33% of all traffic from the seven sites. The high was 52% for one site, and 16% a low for another site. That can mean a lot. If you know one third of all your traffic is going to occur on just one page,  the home page, you better make sure it’s great. Flipping it around though, two thirds of all the page views were occurring someplace else besides that one page. Where should you be spending your time improving your site? Check your stats!

I then checked the ten sites to see what their top landing page was. Seven out of ten of those had the home page as the top landing page. Percentage of first page views to the home page varied wildly from 20% to 95%. The average amount of times the home page acted as the landing page was 62% from those sites.If the law of averages works on a larger scale then just ten sites, I’m thinking more effort really does need to be put on the home page.

BestWebImage.com’s top landing page is the home page, but it only acts as an entry point for 20% of all its visitors. I get a lot of search engine traffic leading to the posts I write.

What Does It All Mean?

It means the home page is very important for most sites, and it should get a little extra care. It also indicates though, that the home page isn’t everything, and very often a visitor may not even see it. What does that mean? High quality templates, site wide consistency, and call to actions found on every page are mandatory. You never know where you could gain a new fan, prospect, or a new top page for your website.

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