What Is a Home Page?

A website's home page is its main page. It's probably the most important part of any business's site not only because it develops a company's brand, but also because it establishes the site's navigation scheme, which both users and search engines will use to navigate it.

Think about it. The home page is often the first part of a website a new visitor will see. If it's unattractive, loads slow, and doesn't provide visitors with the info they need, it's going to make a bad first impression. As one recent study noted, nearly half of all surveyed users (48%) said that if they go to a site's home page on their mobile devices and it doesn't work well, they take it as a sign that business doesn't care.

Unhelpful home pages are also unattractive to search engines, too. In order to properly index a website so that it can be ranked and result for search queries, search engines use bots called crawlers that, as their name implies, crawl through the website. These crawlers will most likely start with a site's home page, and go from there. If this part of the website doesn't have a good navigation system for the crawlers to use, the search engine won't be able to properly index it, and the site won't rank nearly as well. A good navigation system should allow a user or a search engine to get anywhere on the site within three clicks from the home page.

Basically, home pages are the main part of a website, and are also the most important part, too, so they need to provide helpful info, load quickly, and let users go where they need to.