The latest web design trend, a long scrolling home page, should come with a warning label. While it works beautifully for many websites and helps with mobile optimization, it might not be the right design for your site.
However, before you suddenly decide to switch your web design in favor of a long scrolling home page, you should take a look at what your customers are looking at when they come to your website.
Short vs. Long Scrolling Home Page
Use the Short Home Page if: your company has multiple products, services or audiences. If people are coming to your home page for many different reasons, you can’t answer it all in one page. If you try to answer all questions on the home page, many prospective customers will leave before they scroll all the way down to find their answer
Your home page needs to introduce visitors to the most common choices. Links or calls to action quickly direct them off the home page to a more relevant section of the website.
Use a long scrolling home page for a single product or event. The long scrolling home page is a great way to deliver a lot of information quickly. When there is a logical flow from section to section, your audience is more likely to stay engaged if they can simply scroll rather than returning to the menu to navigate to the next section.
In order for this design to work, each piece of information on the home page must serve a specific purpose encouraging the visitor to keep scrolling. When you simply tack on an unrelated row of information, it interrupts the flow and usually sends them back to the top of the page, or worse, back to Google to find another site.
Everything you put on your page needs to serve a purpose, supporting your business objectives. When you look at each space critically it is easy to spot when your page has become too long.
Does your business use a long scrolling home page?