A redesign brief we get constantly reads something like: "make it feel more premium, more modern, cleaner." Those are aesthetic instructions. None of them answer the only question that actually determines whether a homepage works: what is the one thing you want a visitor to do before they leave?
Most brochures try to say everything. That's fine for a brochure — someone picked it up on purpose and is willing to flip through it. A homepage gets 8 to 12 seconds of attention from someone who didn't ask to be there. If it tries to say everything, it says nothing loudly enough to act on.
The redesign that actually moved conversion
For one client, we didn't touch the color palette or the logo. We cut the homepage from eleven sections to six, removed three competing calls-to-action, and made the hero answer one question — "what does this company actually do, for whom, and why should I believe them" — in under two seconds of reading. Demo requests went up 31% with a visually simpler, "less impressive" page than what came before.
Three things almost every homepage gets wrong
Too many primary CTAs. "Get a Demo," "Start Free Trial," "Contact Sales," and "Learn More" competing in the same viewport isn't giving visitors options — it's making them decide which choice not to trust. Pick one primary action per page and make everything else visually secondary.
Proof buried below the fold. Trust signals — logos, numbers, testimonials — usually get shoved into a strip near the bottom, after three sections of adjective-heavy copy the visitor never reached. If nobody scrolls past section two, your proof needs to live in section two.
Design decisions with no owner. "Make it pop" isn't a design requirement, it's a mood. Every element on a homepage should be traceable to a decision: this exists because it moves someone toward the one action we care about. If you can't answer why a section is there, that's usually the section to cut.
What we ask before any redesign starts
Not "what should this look like," but "what is this page's job, and how will we know if it did it." A homepage isn't a portfolio piece for your design team — it's a machine with one output. Design it, measure it, and be willing to cut anything, however polished, that isn't contributing to that one output.