Squarespace Homepage Tips: What to Put on Your Home Page
Your homepage has one job: in a few seconds, help the right visitor decide whether they are in the right place and what to do next. Most people will not start here, because search and links send them to inner pages, but anyone who gets curious about you ends up here. These are the things I check on every homepage I build.
Say what you do in the first screen
Before anyone scrolls, the first screen should answer three questions: what do you offer, who is it for, and what should I do next? Write a headline that states the offer plainly (“Wedding photography in San Diego” beats a clever slogan), add one supporting sentence, and give it one button.
Choose one main action
Decide what you most want a visitor to do, whether that is booking a call, buying, reading or subscribing, and make that the one prominent button. Repeat it once near the bottom of the page. Everything else can be a quieter text link, because two equal buttons make people hesitate.
Build it from sections that answer questions in order
Squarespace 7.1 pages are built from sections, and you can reorder them freely. A reliable order is: introduction and main button, proof, what you offer, how it works, a few featured projects or products, then a closing call to action. Each section should answer the next question a visitor would have.
Show proof early
Testimonials, client logos, real numbers and your own photos build trust faster than adjectives do. Put one piece of proof close to the top and more further down. Use real images of your work or your team where you can, because generic stock photos tell visitors very little.
Keep the navigation short
Five or six items is plenty. Use plain labels such as Services, About and Contact, and put the main action in the header button so it is visible on every page. If a page does not help a visitor take the next step, it probably does not belong in the main menu.
Check it on a phone
Most visitors will see your homepage on a phone. Use the mobile view in the editor, read the first screen as if you had never seen the site, and make sure the buttons are easy to tap and the text is not squeezed into long narrow lines.
Cover the SEO basics
Write a page SEO title and description in the page settings, and make your main headline real text rather than text inside an image.
Use one main heading (H1) on the page, then smaller headings for each section.
Give every image a short description (alt text).
Keep it fast
Compress images before you upload them, limit the number of fonts, and think twice about autoplay video backgrounds. A slow homepage loses visitors before they have read a word.
Pick the right page as your homepage
Any page can be your homepage. If one thing dominates your site, such as a store or a blog, you can send visitors straight to it. Otherwise, build a regular page from sections as described above.
Measure, then change one thing at a time
Use Squarespace Analytics to see where visitors come from and which pages they visit next, and add Google Analytics if you want more detail. When you change something, such as the button wording or the order of sections, change one thing at a time so you can tell what helped.
Serving more than one language?
Give each language its own homepage at its own address, and link them with a language switcher. Does Squarespace support multiple languages? Four ways to build a multilingual site compares the options.
