How to Make Your Wholesale Website’s Homepage Stand Out From the Crowd: 5 Top Tips
If you’re a wholesaler you’ll know how important your website is to your business – especially your homepage.
Your homepage acts as your digital storefront, designed to entice potential customers in through the door (albeit a virtual one).
Making your homepage stand out will enable you to keep future clients on your website and prevent them from bouncing back off into cyberspace.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a tech whizz to dramatically improve your homepage – often it’s as simple as implementing a few simple changes.
Read on to find out how to make your wholesale homepage so enticing that users will want to hang around!
Time is of the Essence
The speed at which your homepage loads is a crucial aspect of customer experience.
Research shows that bounce rate – the number of visitors that come to your site and leave after only viewing one page – increases significantly the longer a user has to wait for a page to appear.
Only 9.6% of users will leave if the page takes 2 seconds or less to load, compared to 32% if the time creeps up to 7 seconds.
If you want users to stick around and delve deeper into your site, therefore, make sure your homepage loads quickly and smoothly.
You can do this by ensuring images are the right size – huge images are the main culprit when it comes to slowing down your website – and that they’re formatted correctly.
You can also perform other basic housekeeping tasks to keep your website speedy, such as compressing files and fixing broken links. For more inspiration, check out this blog post.
Make your homepage easy to navigate
A successful wholesaler’s website is one that shows its potential customers where to go to get what they need.
After all, a busy potential buyer will not want to waste time trawling through your site looking for products.
They’re much more likely to leave your page – and possibly wind up on the website of your competitor- if it’s not immediately apparent what you offer.
You can make your user journey easy by ensuring the categories on your homepage are clear and easy to understand.
For example, check out the homepage of wholesalers A&K Hosiery below. A potential buyer can see clearly what the wholesaler stocks and where
It’s also important that your search bar function (and if you think you can get away with not having one on your website, you’re wrong!) is easy to use and actually works!
A straightforward type-in box option (see below) is the best bet – anything more complicated can be frustrating to use.
Also, make sure important information is situated at the top of your homepage, not hidden away down at the bottom.
Most people will be accessing your site from a mobile phone and are unlikely to waste time scrolling to find important info.
Keep important info. arranged in tabs along with the head of the page, or alternatively down the side. Ideas for what you could include here are:
- About Us (people like some background on the company)
- Products (what are you selling)
- Wholesale (makes it easy for wholesale buyers to land on the right page)
- Contact Us (in case somebody wants to get in touch directly, always make sure your contact details are quick to access).
Steer Clear of Jargon
If what you do and what you sell are buried in layers of complex, technical language you’re likely to lose people’s attention.
Explain your product clearly and keep sentences short and punchy.
Also, stay away from big chunks of unbroken text. Remember – most people are reading from mobile phones, and a lengthy paragraph may be enough to send them packing.
You don’t have to use full sentences on a homepage either: Bullet points are an excellent idea. They display information clearly and concisely and are short enough to be skim-read.
Make sure your images and text match Up
If you run a wholesale website, images of your product are key to your success. Potential customers are much more likely to place an order if they can see high-quality photographs of what you sell.
However, that doesn’t mean you can overload your homepage with images just for the sake of it.
Not only could a bundle of images and graphics slow your load speed down – as mentioned above – but if they’re not relevant, is there any point in using them?
The answer is no! Every photo and every graphic you use on your homepage must have a valid reason for being there.
Concentrate on using images that show your product and people using it in relevant settings and steer clear of graphics – no matter how “cool” they may be – they contribute nothing to the substance of your site.
Explain why you’re different
Potential customers may have landed on the homepage of your wholesale business after hours of searching – which means they’ve probably come across some of your competitors along the way.
You want to grab their attention and convince them your product is the one they should be buying – so don’t undersell yourself.
Make sure you use your homepage to clearly point out what makes you different from the rest.
Do you offer interesting deals when it comes to shipping or minimum order quantity that you know your competitors don’t? Do you offer incentives to new customers or rewards for repeat business? Have you won any industry awards?
Get this info clearly displayed on your homepage and it’s bound to impress new visitors.
Your homepage is also the perfect place to display some glowing reviews from previous customers – showing how highly your product is recommended by somebody else is a sure-fire way to secure new business!
Conclusion
Your homepage is one of the main selling points of your wholesale business’s website.
If it’s neglected, crammed with pointless images and slow to load, it could be genuinely damaging to the success of your business.
So it’s well worth investing some time in tidying up your homepage and making sure it’s the best it can be.
Simple steps like tidying up text, updating important information and optimizing your load speed could be the difference between securing an order and losing one.
And remember, if you want to ensure your wholesale website is getting found by potential customers we have over 20 years of experience matching wholesalers to trade buyers at the Wholesaler UK:
Get in touch with us today to discover how advertising in our online directory could help boost your sales.
And for even more great ideas on how to effectively market your wholesale business, check out our blog.