The homepage was once a valued, integral website asset – the gateway to a company’s brand and a driver of customer engagement. It was so important, there used to be employees whose sole job was to manage a brand’s homepage - Then came search and social. For the past 10 years, the way content gets discovered has evolved dramatically. The rise of Google, and then social media, has created entirely new paths for website visitors to find content without ever navigating to a brand’s homepage. In 2014, leaked data from The New York Times showed a plunge in its homepage visitors instigating the now commonly accepted belief that this digital real estate has lost its value. Based on internal customer data, just five percent of website visitors enter through the homepage. The other 95 percent are “side-door traffic” visitors, who land on a company’s website via search or social media postings that direct users to a specific page. As a result,...
