Test a new homepage on real buyers before launch

Key takeaways

To test a homepage before launch, ask five people who match your buyer to use it while you watch. Give them realistic tasks, ask them to think aloud and do not help. It takes an afternoon, needs no special tools and will show you where a page your team loves still confuses real people.

• Test with five people who match your buyer.
• Give them tasks, not a tour.
• Watch and listen, and do not help.
• Fix what several people struggle with.

Who should test a new homepage?

Test with people who match your buyer but have not worked on the page. Customers, a friend of a customer or people recruited through your network all work. Avoid staff and close family, who already know too much. Nielsen Norman Group's research found five users uncover most of a page's main usability problems.

• How to create a high-converting homepage for an SME
• User testing for small business websites
• Research your buyers before you draft a homepage

What tasks should you give them?

Set tasks that reflect real decisions: find out whether this firm covers your area, work out roughly what it would cost and get in touch. Start by showing the page for five seconds and asking what the business does. Tasks reveal problems that a request for opinions never will.

• Five seconds: what does this business do?
• Would you trust it, and why?
• Find a specific service or price.
• Show me how you would get in touch.
• What is still unclear?

• First-click testing: is the first step the right one?
• The five questions every homepage visitor needs answered

How do you run a session?

Use the person's own phone if possible, with a link to the staging page. Ask them to think aloud. Stay quiet when they struggle, as the struggle is the finding. Record the session, with permission, or take notes. Thirty minutes each is plenty, and you can run them remotely with screen sharing.

• Build your new homepage on a staging site

What should you do with the findings?

List what happened, not what people said they liked. Prioritise problems that stopped someone completing a task, or that more than one person hit. Fix those before launch. Single opinions about colour can wait. Sort the rest into a list for your first 30 days after launch.

• Which homepage problem should you fix first?
• The first 30 days after launching a homepage

When is testing not worth doing?

Skip it for small text changes. It may also be too late if you test the day before launch with no time to fix anything. Leave at least a week. A rough test on a working draft beats a formal one that cannot change anything.

• When to launch a new homepage: pick the quiet week

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see: a team is confident about its homepage, and the first tester cannot say what the company actually sells. It is an uncomfortable moment, and also the most useful one in the project, because the fix at this stage may only be a sentence.

• See client work
• Website Design & Development for UK businesses

Homepage buyer test checklist

• Recruit five target buyers.
• Write three realistic tasks.
• Run a five-second test first.
• Ask them to think aloud.
• Stay quiet while they work.
• Fix what blocked the tasks.

• A franchise homepage: one brand, many local owners
• Test your homepage enquiry route from end to end

Next step

Ask one customer this week to spend 15 minutes on your draft while you watch. One session is much better than none.