The bones of a great one-page site

Making a website shouldn’t feel like rocket science. But we’ve all been there, slightly frustrated and thinking “what the hell should I put on this website?”. Rather than rolling over and accepting defeat, we decided to take action and find the answer.

We analyzed the best, most renowned pages on the internet as well as high-performing pages we have built and reverse-engineered them to a relatively simple formula. Below you’ll see what we found and read a bit about each section to help you come up with some ideas for your business.

Disclaimer: some web pages have more than information, some have less. But this is a structure that you can use to simplify the website content process and kickstart your new page.

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Here is the rough page structure of the best home pages on the internet, including your future page.

1. Hero
2. Credibility
3. The what you do
4. The features
5. The why
6. The extra stuff

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Each section should be made of the following elements:

• Clear copy
• Informative visuals
• One desired user action

Hero

Here’s the ultimate test: if a new user lands on your website, can they understand what you do without scrolling to learn more? If not, your hero section has some work to do.

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Credibility

If a stranger were to interrupt your elevator pitch and say “why should I continue listening you to speak about this? What makes this legitimate?” What would your answer be? Do you have a fortune 500 company on your platform? Do your users save 2 hours per day when they utilize what you offer? Have you had success before? This is that section. Depending on how young your company is, this section needs to be early on the page, hopefully immediately after your hero section earned the scroll.

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What you do

This is likely going to be the beefiest section (or sections) of your site. This section is often just your highlight reel of features of your service (think 3-6 of your most valued features). But that’s not what the best websites do here. They have their best features shown with the visual and the accompanying copy speaks to the emotional benefit of the feature. Read that last sentence again. Do that combination and you set yourself up to win.

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The features

If you have a dense feature list or offer something that demands some more technical explanations, it is this section where that information lives. Let’s say you sell your service to financial controllers & CTOs of companies, this is where you get into the details of your service and check all of the boxes they need to see before booking that call with you.

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The Why

Sometimes this section is left out, but this can serve as a pre-CTA if you will. This section is for the attacking brand that is not the leader in the space. For the scrappy company, this is where you can give your visitors some meat to sink their teeth into and feel some emotion regarding your company. This section can be about any or all of the following:

• Why your company
• Why your platform
• Why now
• Why not your competitor

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The extras

If you have extra information that your visitors want or ask about on the phone or on your chat function, put it here.

Think of anything that helps your visitors do their homework and feel confident in what you are offering. That’s what this is all about. Give them all the ammo to make the decision to take action and enhance their life that you spoke about in the what you do section.

• FAQs
• Blogs
• Resources
• Case Studies
• Podcasts
• Events
• Etc.

How it works

If your business has a streamlined process, this section can be your new best friend. State your process as simply as you can, with only a few words for each step. You’ll earn huge bonus points if you can show a visual of each step. If you use this section, place it closer to the top of the page right after your what you do section.

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