Posted in Website Design Tips	August 13, 2008

Should your homepage design offer full-length articles to increase conversions, or use snippets to increase clicks?

If you are a product-driven website, you are likely displaying a list of bestselling products or featured products in your homepage design. Because of this, you should want to keep users engaged long enough to see your best-of's by posting full articles on your homepage. On the other hand, there are reasons to use snippets too. Run through this list to decide which route is best for your homepage design.

Five instances when putting full articles in your homepage design is a BAD IDEA:

When you're ad-driven - If you're ad-driven, you want people to click to as many pages as they can, so full posts on the homepage will easily decrease page views.

When you have long posts - If you post a lot of interviews or in-depth posts, stick to snippets in your homepage design to decrease load time and keep your readers focused.

When you use lots of images - One image per post isn't bad, but if you're loading a lot of fancy graphics, photos or diagrams, less is more. A best practice here is to show one graphic and an 80-100 character snippet like GolfVacationInsider.com.

When you use videos in your posts - Even one video can dramatically increase load time, so if your content uses video often, it's better to mention there's a video related to the article and ask people to click into the post.

When you only post once a day - In order to keep the most recent content on the homepage, snippets work better for homepages that are frequently updated. This way, when someone frequents your site multiple times a day, they can easily see what's new.

If you don't fall into any of those brackets, you might consider using full-length posts in your homepage design. From our research, we've found that using full-length posts on the homepage increases the average time spent on your site as well as conversion rates.

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Five instances when putting full posts in your homepage design is a GOOD IDEA:

When you're product-driven - If you're selling products, you're much less concerned about page views and more concerned with time spent and conversion rates (which are increased by full-length articles in your homepage design).

When you have great conversion architecture - If you have a prominently displayed ad for a free product on your homepage, both at the top of the page (OFIE) and in the right navigation (OFIN), your conversion rate will increase. If you have better conversion on your article pages, you should either upgrade your homepage, or stick with homepage snippets.

Your articles are short - If you have short articles, then featuring full-length posts on your homepage will automatically increase average user time spent on your homepage. Celebrity gossip sites like TMZ list as many as 16 posts on their homepage.

When you don't write great snippets - If the best part of your content is within the article and not in the intro, you need to either work on making those snippets better, or include the full post.

When your posts aren't comment-enabled - We wouldn't recommend this in general, but if your blog is more of a branding blog and doesn't allow comments, you have even less of a reason to drive someone to a new page.

When we polled our Twitter friends, a group of engaged blog readers and contributors, the overwhelming response was that they prefer full-length content on a homepage design and in an RSS feed; "the less clicks the better", one respondent told us. The opposing argument for some was when you post multiple articles a day, snippets make it easier to sift through the content.

This won't tell you where you'll get your best conversion rate though, so ask yourself these questions above and see what suits your homepage design better, full articles or snippets.