What Your Squarespace Homepage Should Actually Do
Someone spends an afternoon on their homepage. Rewrites the headline. Swaps a photo. Drags a button three centimetres to the left. When they're done, it still doesn't feel right. So they close the laptop, and a few weeks later, open it back up and start again.
Nothing they changed was ever the problem. It's what the page is built to do.
Structure is the problem, not the surface
A homepage has one job: move a visitor toward a single decision.
Not describe the business. Not list every service. Not impress. Decide.
Most homepages fail at this before a single word is written or the first pixel is dragged into place - because nobody defined what that one decision was. So every section ends up competing for attention instead of building toward it. The hero says one thing. The next section says something slightly different. By the time someone hits the footer, they've been offered five different directions and taken none of them.
Rewriting the headline doesn't fix that. Neither does moving the button. Both just rearrange the surface of an already unclear structure.
What a homepage actually needs to accomplish
Before you touch copy or tweak your design, your homepage needs to answer four things, in order:
What do you do, and who is it for? Answered in seconds, not paragraphs.
Why should I believe you? Proof - a result, a client, a credential - placed early enough to matter.
What happens if I keep scrolling? Each section should build a case, not repeat the last one.
What do I do now? One clear next step. Not three competing ones.
If your homepage can't answer these in order, the issue sits in the structure. Copy edits and layout tweaks on top of a broken structure just rearrange the confusion.
The five-second test
Here's a quick way to check where the problem actually lives:
Open your homepage. Time yourself finding the one thing you want a visitor to do next - book a call, enquire, buy, sign up. Whatever it is.
If it takes longer than five seconds, that's not a copy problem. That's a structure problem. No amount of headline tweaking fixes a page that's asking a visitor to do too many things at once.
Why this keeps happening
Most DIY homepages get built section by section, added over time as the business changes. A service gets added here. A testimonial gets bolted on there. Nothing gets removed. Eventually you've got a page that reflects the business's entire history instead of the one thing a new visitor actually needs to know right now.
That's not a criticism - it's how every homepage gets built without a strategy behind it. But it's also exactly why moving words around or shuffling sections doesn't help. You're rearranging furniture in a room that was never laid out with a purpose to begin with.
Structure before style
This is the order strategy actually works in:
Clarify what the homepage needs to achieve and for whom
Architect the sections so each one builds toward the decision
Refine the copy so it does that job clearly
Design so it looks like the business it's representing
Skip straight to word-smithing or section-shuffling and you're doing step three without steps one and two. That's why it never quite feels finished - because it isn't.
What to do next
If you've been quietly fiddling with your homepage for a while and it still doesn't feel right, that feeling is data. It's telling you the fix isn't sitting in the words. It's sitting in what the page was built to do before any of the words went in.
I'm putting together a proper guide on exactly this - how to structure a homepage that does its job before a single sentence gets written. Want to be one of the first to receive it when it’s ready? Add your name to the waitlist below and I’ll send it your way first.
