Your homepage is old news. Here’s what you can do about it.

Entering through the front door of a house is similar to entering through the homepage on a website. Nowadays, more visitors likely come to your site through other pages so you need to plan for it.

Imagine if you threw a party at your house and your guests came in through windows, the basement, the porch door, and the garage door as well as through the front door. It would probably catch you off-guard, but the guests may also be a little disoriented and not know where to go.

This may be what’s happening with your website visitors. Nowadays, a lot of people may be following links on social media or other websites to get to your site. Many of those links point to a specific article or resource instead of your homepage. It’s more important than ever that your visitors know how to find information on your site, no matter which page they visit first.

To do:

Review your analytics and see which pages are your top “landing pages.” These are the pages on your website that your visitors see first. Your homepage will likely be at the top of the list, but you may also have a few others that are popular landing pages as well. Take a look at the top five, not including the homepage. Ask yourself these questions:

• Will visitors understand the context of the content? For example, if it’s a “step 8” in a series of 10 steps, will they know that they should also check out previous steps before working on number 8?
• Will visitors be able to easily find information about your organization from that page?
• Is there a clear call to action?

Here are some suggestions to improve your landing pages:

• Add an introduction to the page that gives context.
• Use breadcrumbs to help visitors understand where they are on the website.
• Link to related content. For example, if there are 10 steps, have clear links to the previous and next steps. Or, point them to more resources or articles in that category.
• Use the “related content” feature in AddThis to automatically suggest another article.
• Add information about your organization in the footer so visitors can understand what your organization is about no matter which page they are on.
• Make sure the call to action is clear and not tucked away in a sidebar or on another page.