Designing without a homepage

Some sites do not need a homepage. The studio has shipped three this year that do not have one.

A homepage, in the traditional sense, is a page that summarises the company, lists the major sections of the site, and tries to point each kind of visitor at the page they want. For most company websites, this is a reasonable structure. For some, it is not. The signs that a site does not need a homepage:

The audience comes to the site for a specific reason. A documentation site is the obvious example. Nobody arrives at the documentation site looking for “an overview of the company”. They want to know how to use the product. The homepage, if there is one, is doing nothing.

The site has one principal job. A booking site for a restaurant. A signup page for a single product. A portfolio for a single working illustrator. The homepage is, in each case, the only useful page, and the rest of the site is supporting infrastructure.

The audience does not arrive at the root URL. Most visitors to most content-heavy sites arrive on a specific article, deep-linked from elsewhere, and never visit the homepage at all. The homepage is doing work for, at most, a tenth of the audience.

What replaces the homepage, in the cases where the site does not need one.

For documentation sites, the root URL goes directly to the most-used reference page or to the table of contents. No marketing. No “welcome”.

For single-product sites, the root URL is the product page. The CTAs are at the top.

For portfolio sites, the root URL is the work itself, sorted by recency, with the explanation of what the studio does in the footer or in a small “About” page reachable from the navigation.

For content-heavy sites, the root URL is a short author note plus the most recent posts. No “featured” carousel. No “pillar pages”. The reader is here to read.

A few sites I keep open as references:

Linear’s docs start at the most-used reference. No homepage in the marketing sense.

Frank Chimero’s site has a structure that is closer to a personal essay than a homepage. It works because the audience knows what they are visiting.

Robin Rendle’s site shows the most recent notes by default. The “homepage” is the archive.

Ahmad Shadeed’s site is similar. The most recent technical post is the front door.

The homepage is, often, a vestigial design pattern that the rest of the site has outgrown. The studios that ship without one tend to produce calmer, more focused sites that get out of the user’s way. The studios that insist on a homepage when the site does not need one tend to ship sites where the homepage is the slowest, most-cluttered, least-used page on the site.

If you are designing a site and you are stuck on the homepage, ask whether the site needs a homepage at all. The honest answer, more often than the field admits, is no.