Declining importance of the homepage

Duncan Stephen
Tuesday 16 December 2014

The continued decline of the homepage

While organisations (including ours) continue to focus on the homepage, Gerry McGovern provides the reminder that the true value of the website comes from other pages.

Google is your new homepage. Every page you have is a homepage for someone. We must think beyond the traditional homepage.

“The value of the homepage is decreasing,” a leaked New York Times report stated in May 2014. “Only a third of our readers ever visit it. And those who do visit are spending less time: page views and minutes spent per reader dropped by double-digit percentages last year.”

“Across The Atlantic sites, the fraction of visits that begin on the homepage is surprisingly small,” Bob Cohn, editor of Atlantic Digital wrote in 2012. About 13 percent of visits to our flagship TheAtlantic.com start on the homepage. We have found that for many of the sites we track the percentage of those visiting the homepage is somewhere between 5% and 15%.

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