Five seconds on a phone

A cold visitor does not study your homepage. They open it on a phone, often from a search result or a message, and they decide quickly whether this page is for them. The first screen has one job: answer three questions before they leave.

What do you do? Who is it for? What should they do next? If those three are plain, they can act, or they can scroll because they already know why. If they are missing, extra sections lower down will not rescue the page. People rarely hunt for a sentence that should have been at the top.

What the first screen has to do

The first screen is whatever shows before a thumb moves. On a phone that space is short. A large photograph can spend all of it. So can a slogan, or a menu. None of those is the job. The job is a plain statement of the offer, the person, and one next step, in type they can read without pinching.

You do not need your origin story in that space. You do not need every service you have ever sold. You do not need a line that could go on any van in the country. “Quality you can trust” and “Welcome to our website” feel polite and tell a stranger nothing. Save the history, the full list, and the photograph for after the offer is clear.

Test it on the phone you carry

A narrowed window on a laptop flatters the type size, and it hides how far a thumb has to reach. Use the phone you actually use. Mobile data is better than office wifi for this, because a slow page is part of the verdict.

1. Open your live homepage, or the draft if that is all you have.
2. Hold the phone at a normal reading distance. Do not pinch or zoom.
3. Look for about five seconds, then lock the screen or look away.
4. From memory, write three lines: what you do, who it is for, and the next step.
5. Look back. If a line is blank, vague, or simply wrong, the page did not say it.

What usually fills those five seconds

• A logo and a tagline, and no sentence about the work.
• A photograph that pushes the words below the fold.
• A row of buttons: Learn more, Our services, Contact.
• Type so small that reading it means zooming.
• A menu of services you have to tap before you know what the business is.

None of that tells a stranger whether to stay. If you cannot say what the business does after one look, they cannot either. The rest of this course is how to write the three lines, then check them against the live page. The ten-point version of that check is the homepage checklist. You will use it properly in the last lesson. You can open it now if you want to see the gaps before you rewrite.