What Should Your Homepage Actually Say?
Open your homepage right now.
Copy your headline and the sentence beneath it. Now imagine pasting those exact words onto your closest competitor’s website.
Does anything break?
If nothing breaks, if your words would sit comfortably on a rival’s page describing a completely different business, then those words are doing no work at all. They occupy the most valuable space you own and they transfer nothing.
Deciding what to put on your homepage starts by deleting everything that survives that test.
The Sentences Every Kenyan Service Website Uses
You have read all of these. Some of them are probably on your site.
We are passionate about excellence.
Your trusted partner in growth.
We deliver quality solutions tailored to your needs.
Welcome to our website.
With years of experience, we pride ourselves on customer satisfaction.
Every one of them moves to any other business in any other industry without a single edit. They feel like professional writing because we have all seen them a thousand times. They carry no information whatsoever.
Your reader is not offended by them. Something worse happens. Your reader learns nothing, finds no reason to stay, and leaves.
The Five-Second Test
A visitor lands on your homepage. Within about five seconds they decide whether to stay.
Three questions need answering inside that window.
- What do you do?
- Who is it for?
- What do I do next?
Not your history. Not your mission statement. Not a welcome message.
Show your homepage to somebody who does not know your business. Give them five seconds, close the laptop, and ask them what you do. Their answer is your real headline, whether you like it or not.
The Headline: What You Do, For Whom, What Changes
Your headline is the most valuable line on your website. Write it so specifically that a competitor could not use it.
Weak: Transforming businesses through innovative solutions. Better: Bookkeeping for Nairobi restaurants, done monthly.
Weak: Empowering you to reach your full potential. Better: Career coaching for mid career professionals changing industry.
Weak: Your trusted legal partner. Better: Employment law for Kenyan SMEs. Contracts, disputes, terminations.
The stronger versions name the service and name the audience. They lose nobody except the people who were never going to hire you, which is the point. A homepage written to appeal to everybody converts nobody.
Beneath the headline, one supporting sentence earns its place by adding what the headline could not carry: how it works, what it costs, or how quickly it happens.
Where Proof Belongs
Proof belongs high on the page.
The moment somebody understands what you do, they think one thing. Says who? Answer that immediately.
Useful proof includes named clients, specific results, testimonials carrying a full name and role, logos of organisations you have worked with, numbers you can defend, and credentials that genuinely matter in your field.
Anonymous praise achieves almost nothing. “Great service, highly recommend” attributed to a satisfied client reads as invented, because most of the time it is. One testimonial with a real name and a specific outcome outperforms six vague ones.
Our post on trust signals every website needs covers the wider set.
One Call to Action, Repeated
Most homepages offer too many next steps. Book a call, download the guide, follow us, subscribe, browse services, request a quote, chat on WhatsApp.
Every extra option makes the decision harder. Faced with a hard decision, your visitor resolves it by doing nothing.
Choose the single action you most want somebody to take. Place it near the top, again in the middle, and again at the end. Use identical wording each time, and choose words describing the outcome rather than the mechanism. Request a quote beats Submit.
Everything else becomes secondary: smaller, lower, quieter.
What Belongs Below the Fold
Once the top of the page has done its job, the rest supports it.
How you work. Three or four steps. People want to know what happens after they contact you.
Services in brief, each linking to a full page. Your homepage summarises. It does not explain everything.
Who you are. A short human introduction with a real photograph. For coaches, consultants, and solo professionals this matters enormously, because the client is hiring a person.
Pricing, or a starting figure. Silence on price sends people to whoever answered the question.
The questions you get asked most. They are already sitting in your WhatsApp history.
Contact details that work. Phone, WhatsApp, location, hours. See our guide to effective contact pages.
What Does Not Belong at All
Welcome to our website. Your reader knows where they are.
A mission statement above the fold. Nobody has ever bought because of a mission statement.
A long founder’s letter on the homepage. Move it to the about page where it belongs.
Stock photographs of foreign offices. Everybody recognises them, and they raise the question of what you are hiding.
Sliders rotating through five messages. Most visitors see the first slide only, so you have hidden four messages and slowed the page down to do it.
Walls of unbroken text. People skim. Short paragraphs, clear subheadings, sentences that carry meaning on their own.
Rebuilding One Homepage, Line by Line
Suppose you are a leadership coach in Nairobi.
Before: Welcome to our website. We are passionate about unlocking human potential and empowering individuals and organisations to achieve excellence through transformative coaching solutions.
After:
Leadership coaching for newly promoted managers.
Six sessions across three months, in person in Nairobi or online. For people managing a team for the first time and finding it harder than they expected.
[Book a free 20 minute call]
Trusted by managers at [named organisations]. “I stopped avoiding difficult conversations.” Wanjiru M., Operations Manager
Same business. Roughly the same word count. One version tells you nothing. The other gives you the service, the audience, the format, the duration, the location, the next step, and the proof.
Our guide to making website content more human goes further into tone.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should the first line of my homepage say? What you do and who it serves, in plain words. Not a welcome, not a mission statement.
How long should a homepage be? Long enough to answer the obvious questions and no longer. For most service businesses that means one screen of essentials plus four or five short supporting sections.
Should I write my own website copy? You should supply the raw material, because you know how clients describe their problem. Tightening it is a separate skill. We pull copy out of one call rather than asking you to submit finished text.
Should I put prices on my homepage? A range or a starting figure usually helps. People who cannot afford you leave, which saves everybody time.
Do I need a photograph of myself? If you are a coach, consultant, or solo professional, yes. Your client is hiring you personally.
How often should I update my homepage? Whenever your offer, pricing, or audience changes. Otherwise leave it alone and improve it based on what visitors actually do.
Say Something Only You Could Say
The test at the top of this article is the whole method. If a sentence would work equally well on a competitor’s website, cut it and write one that would not.
At Africa Web Experts we pull your copy out of how you already describe your work. One call, then we tighten it. Websites from KES 65,000, live in seventy two hours, on your own domain.
