UX / Homepage
What Should an Ecommerce Homepage Include?
// every element earns its place by helping someone move onward
By Fracto Solutions
October 8, 2026
The short answer
An ecommerce homepage should include, in priority order: a clear value proposition, primary navigation and search, featured categories or products, trust and social proof, and easy access to help and policies. Lead with what helps a first-time visitor understand the store and find a way in; push supporting detail lower or into the footer.
70%
55%
~57%
What goes at the top?
The value proposition, navigation, and search. A first-time visitor should instantly understand what you sell and who it’s for, and have an obvious way to start browsing or searching. Everything else is secondary to that first orientation.
The top of the page carries the most weight, so spend it on clarity rather than decoration. Nielsen Norman Group’s eye-tracking work, 120 participants and more than 130,000 fixations, puts about 57% of page-viewing time above the fold and more than 42% in the top fifth of the page alone. That average covers several page types rather than ecommerce homepages specifically, and NN/g’s 2010 equivalent of 80% was measured on a smaller screen, so it is a change in measured distribution rather than proof that people scroll more. Either way the first screen takes the majority. This is the checklist companion to our homepage pillar, and the top-of-page detail lives in the above-the-fold guide.
What belongs in the middle of the page?
Ways into the catalog and reasons to trust you: featured categories or products, best-sellers or new arrivals, and social proof like reviews or press. This is where you turn initial orientation into a specific next click.
Section
Purpose
Notes
Featured categories
Clear entry points into the catalog
Pick a few, not everything
Best-sellers / new in
A confident default for undecided shoppers
Rotate; keep it genuinely popular
Social proof
Reviews, ratings, press, user content
Specific beats generic
Brand story (brief)
Why this store, in a line or two
Link out; don't overload the homepage
Give undecided shoppers a confident way in; keep each section focused on a single next step.
One benchmark finding is worth building this section around. Baymard reports that 70% of sites give no direct access to products from their inspirational imagery, which is the single most common way a beautiful homepage fails: the lifestyle shot draws the eye and then leads nowhere. If you feature a styled scene, make the products in it reachable. The same benchmark finds 55% of sites running overly aggressive or distracting ads on the homepage, which is the other side of the same mistake, attention spent on something that does not move anyone onward.
What belongs lower down or in the footer?
Reassurance and logistics: shipping and returns policies, contact and help, trust badges, and a fuller category or link list. Shoppers look here before buying, so make it easy to find, but it doesn’t need to compete for attention up top.
The footer does quiet but important work, it’s where people check policies and find reassurance before they commit, which ties into building trust on a new store. Keep it thorough without crowding the top of the page.
What should you leave off?
Anything that competes with the homepage’s job of orienting and routing: auto-rotating carousels, every promotion at once, long blocks of text, and intrusive pop-ups before a visitor has seen anything. Subtraction is often the biggest homepage win.
If an element doesn’t help a visitor understand the store or move onward, it’s clutter. Cutting overload usually does more for a homepage than adding another feature.
Carousels are the usual first candidate for removal, and the numbers are stark. Erik Runyon tracked carousel clicks against homepage visitors on nd.edu and found that approximately 1% of visitors clicked a carousel feature at all, with 84% of the 28,928 recorded clicks landing on the first slide. That is 2013 data from a university site and it counts clicks rather than views, so treat it as an indication rather than a law. The direction is consistent though: the space a carousel occupies is doing very little work. If you keep one, make slide one carry the message, because that is where nearly all the engagement goes.
We prioritize homepage elements by what moves people onward, then cut the rest.
We order the homepage around what a first-time visitor needs to orient and click deeper, trim the overload most stores accumulate, and check in the data whether more people move into categories and products.
It’s the same measurement-first approach behind our conversion optimization work: we agree the metric before the test runs and report the result at the confidence level the test actually reached.
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Frequently asked questions
Do I need an About section on the homepage?
A brief brand line or two can help, especially for newer brands, but keep it short and link out to a fuller story. The homepage’s main job is orienting and routing, not telling your whole history.
Where should shipping and returns info go?
Usually the footer, plus reassurance near key decision points. Shoppers actively look there before buying, so make it easy to find without crowding the top of the page.
Should the homepage show prices?
Featured products can show prices, which sets expectations and builds trust. The homepage itself is about orientation, so don’t turn it into a full product list.
How much text should a homepage have?
Little. Lead with a clear value proposition and let navigation, categories, and visuals do the work. Long text blocks on a homepage usually go unread.
Sources
Homepage-specific compliance gaps: Baymard Institute, 2025 homepage and category navigation UX benchmark. 180+ leading US and European sites, 16,000+ UX elements manually reviewed and scored. 70% do not provide direct access to products in inspirational imagery; 55% use overly aggressive and distracting ads on the homepage; 59% do not provide the full scope for links on mobile homepages, which is a mobile-only measure. The other two are not device-split. Figures are quoted as Baymard states them. Published 6 August 2024, last updated 30 September 2025. https://baymard.com/blog/ecommerce-navigation-best-practice
Attention above and below the fold: Nielsen Norman Group, “Scrolling and Attention”, published 15 April 2018. Eye-tracking across 120 participants and more than 130,000 fixations on a 1920×1080 screen, covering news, ecommerce, blogs, FAQ and encyclopedic pages. About 57% of page-viewing time above the fold; 74% within the first two screenfuls; more than 42% within the top 20% of the page; more than 65% within the top 40%. Two limits we state rather than bury: these are averages across page types and industries, not an ecommerce or homepage cut, and NN/g’s stated goal was to characterise general ranges of behaviour rather than analyse individual sites. NN/g’s 2010 equivalent was 80%, but measured on a 1024×768 screen against 1920×1080 in 2018, and NN/g explicitly declines to separate the effect of larger screens from any change in user behaviour, so we present it as a change in measured distribution and not as proof that people scroll more. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/scrolling-and-attention/
Carousel engagement: Erik Runyon, “Carousel Interaction Stats”, published 22 January 2013, measuring nd.edu from mid-October 2012. Approximately 1% of homepage visitors clicked a carousel feature; of the 28,928 clicks recorded, 84% landed on position 1 with the remaining four positions splitting roughly 4% each. Percentages are clicks measured against homepage visitors in Google Analytics. Note that the separately reported 315,665 figure counts manual feature rotations by users, not impressions, so it is not the denominator for the click rate. Three other Notre Dame sub-sites with static carousels returned 1.7% to 2.3% click-through with position 1 taking 48% to 62%, and one auto-forwarding carousel returned 8.8% with position 1 at 40%. We do not present that as evidence that auto-forwarding works: it is a sample of one, Runyon attributes the differences between his sites to audience rather than carousel type, and he points readers to Nielsen’s warning against auto-forwarding carousels. The data is from 2013 and from university rather than ecommerce sites, and it counts clicks rather than views. https://erikrunyon.com/2013/01/carousel-interaction-stats/
Stated as Fracto’s position, not research: the priority order of homepage sections and the judgement of what belongs in the footer rather than the top of the page. These come from client work rather than a published study.