The first page on most websites is called “home”. The customer types in your domain; they land on your homepage; from there, they follow links into the site to find what they want. This is so universal in 2026 that it feels like a fact about how websites work, rather than a choice somebody made about how websites should work. It's a choice.And for a lot of small businesses, it's the wrong one.
The homepage made sense in the 2000s, when websites were small and customers were exploring. The homepage was the front of the brochure. You opened it; you saw what was inside; you turned to the page that interested you. The architecture was the architecture of a brochure, because the brochure was what people knew.
What's changed is the way customers arrive. They don't type your domain into a browser any more. They google “dentist near Crouch End”, or “Saturday booking florist E8”, or “coffee Bermondsey”. They land on whichever page Google sends them to — which is usually not your homepage. They land on the booking page, the directions page, the menu page. Your homepage was the front of the brochure. They're opening the book at chapter four.
The dental practice
A dental practice we mocked up earlier this year had originally come to us with a draft sitemap that listed eleven pages, headed by Home. We asked what most of their existing customers actually used the site for. The answer was: booking an appointment, finding the practice, looking up which dental insurance was accepted. Three pages. Everything else — the about page, the team page, the philosophy-of-care page, the testimonials archive — was scaffolding around those three.
We built three pages: book, treatments, find us. We linked them from the navigation in that order. We didn't build a homepage. The site lives at practice-name.co.uk/book/ as the front door, with the others one click away. Customers arrive on whichever page their need brought them to.They don't need a different page to summarise the others; they came to use one.
Customers don't need a different page to summarise the others. They came to use one.
The roastery
A small-batch coffee roastery we'd generated for had the inverse instinct: they wanted nothing buta homepage, with all of their content piled into one long scrollable page. Their reasoning was reasonable: most of their traffic came from social media, from people who'd seen their beans tagged in someone else's photo, and those people would want to see everything in one place. We checked the analytics. The traffic was real; the bounce rate at the bottom of their long homepage was almost total.
We split it into three: shop, subscriptions, about the roast. The page hierarchy went down by one level; the bounce rate at the bottom of any individual page halved. Customers were arriving with one specific intent — buy a bag, sign up for the subscription, or read the founder story — and giving them a page that addressed that intent (rather than burying it inside a longer-form omnibus) doubled the engagement.
The default isn't neutral
The lesson is the same in both directions. The page architecture is a real design decision, not a default to inherit. Adding a homepage to a site that doesn't need one introduces a layer of indirection between the customer and what they came for. Removing one from a site that does need one (because the brand needs a single landing surface for cold traffic, say) loses something equally important. The default isn't neutral. It costs the customer time, every time.
Our brief intake — the paragraph customers write when they begin — tries to surface this question early. What pages do you actually need? What does each one need to do? The answer determines the architecture of the site that gets generated. Sometimes the answer is one page. Sometimes it's three. Sometimes it's twelve. The number is in the brief, not in the template.
If you're thinking about whether your business needs a homepage at all, the brief form asks you what each page is for. Or look through the showcase — there are sites in there with one page, and sites with eleven, and a dozen sites in between.