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What comes second
A wide screen shows four things at once and lets the eye choose between them. A phone shows one at a time, in an order you almost certainly did not set.
About 10 minutes
The short version
On a computer, a home page is something you look at. Four or five things are in front of you at once and your eye picks: skip the photograph, glance at the headline, notice a review over on the right, go back for the bit you wanted. Nobody made you read it in any order, because you could see all of it.
Squash that same page into a phone and something changes that has nothing to do with how it looks. Columns that sat side by side go one on top of another. Three things across become three things down. Nothing was added and nothing was removed, and the page is now three times taller.
And the eye lost its job. Your customer cannot see what is coming. They can go to the next thing or they can leave, and that is the whole set of options.
On a wide screen the order is
a suggestion.
On a phone it is
a queue, and nobody can jump it.
This is not a design opinion, it is arithmetic. Every block on your phone home page has a number, and whatever you put at number two pushes everything else one place further away.
Which makes the order the biggest decision on the page. It is also, almost always, the one decision nobody made.
Here is a prediction, and the good thing about it is that you can prove me wrong in two minutes. Go to the template gallery for whatever your website is built on, open three of the ones aimed at trades, and look at the order the blocks come in before anybody has touched them.
I think you will find something very close to this, in something very close to this order.
Roughly what a trade template ships with
I am not going to print a figure for how many small business sites run that shape, because I have not counted them and neither has anybody else I can find. Go and look at three templates instead.
What matters is where that order came from. It was arranged on a wide canvas, to look good as a screenshot in a gallery. Across a computer screen three icons are one tidy strip, and a paragraph about the business sits beside a photograph rather than in front of one. As a composition it works.
Then it got stacked, and the composition became a queue. Nobody re-decided anything at that point, because nobody was there.
Which is not really about templates either. It is what happens to any decision made on a wide screen for a page that gets read on a small one: your website was designed by somebody sitting down.
Before you rearrange anything, it is worth knowing how the rearranging works, because the rules differ and two of them will surprise you. These are the builders’ own help pages.
A row of three, on the older Squarespace
Stacks top to bottom in the order the columns sit left to right. Whichever one is furthest left goes first on a phone.
A row of three, on the newer one
In the areas using its current editor, the phone layout is arranged separately. Moving something here does not move it there.
Inside a section, on Wix
Rearranging within a section is phone-only and will not touch the wide version. Moving something into a different section has to be done on the wide one, and it moves in both.
Outside the lines, on the older Wix
Anything placed outside the gridlines, or with nowhere to fit, is left off the phone version entirely. There is a panel listing what has been hidden.
The first one is the one people do not believe. On a lot of sites the order your customer meets your business in was set by which column looked better on the left, by somebody balancing a photograph.
Whichever builder you are on, moving a whole section up or down is a drag, and it sits in that section’s own menu next to the setting that leaves it off the phone. Ten minutes, not a rebuild.
Somebody has just arrived from a search result. They have never heard of you. They have two other tabs open with two other names in them, and they are not reading your website, they are assessing it.
People in that position ask the same questions in the same order, and I know that because it is the order they ask them in on the phone. Nobody rings a plumber and opens with a question about the journey so far.
So the block straight after your top screen has one job, and it is questions one and two. What you do, and where you go. Usually that is two plain lists, which is the least glamorous thing you could put there and the reason it rarely survives a design review.
Worth being straight, because plenty of people will sell you this running order with a percentage stapled to it. No study I can find has tested whether this sequence beats another one for a small trade business, and if somebody shows you one, look hard at what they were selling. What I will defend is the list of questions, because you already know it is right. You have answered those four, in that order, on the phone, several hundred times.
The block that most often sits at number two is the business talking about itself. Established in 2004. Family owned and operated. Passionate about quality workmanship. The instinct is sound, because all of that is true and it is the thing you are proudest of.
The problem is what it costs. A position near the top is the most valuable space you own, and a story spends one on a question nobody has asked yet. A business your customer already knows can afford that. Nobody opens a bank’s website wondering whether the bank is real.
You are being assessed, not read. Your story is worth a great deal at number five and almost nothing at number two.
All of which raises the question of how far down anybody actually gets, and that is a separate argument with a separate answer: hardly anybody reaches the bottom of your page. Here it is enough that a position gets less valuable the further down it sits, and nobody disputes that part.
Ten minutes, on your own phone, on your own home page. Do them in this order, because the first one produces the thing the other five are done against. Nothing here gets scored and there is nothing to send anybody.
The one that tends to land is the fourth. Everybody knows their own page too well to read it, and thirty seconds watching a stranger scroll past the thing you were most pleased with is worth more than any article about it, including this one.
Nobody chose the order your customers meet you in.
So go and choose it.Write the list. Ninety seconds, nothing but your phone, and it is the only one of the six that produces something you can act on. You cannot reorder a page you have not written down, and almost nobody has written theirs down.
It would be easy to finish an article like this by suggesting you start again, and that is almost never the right answer. Most of what is on your home page deserves to be there. It is in the wrong queue, not on the wrong page.
So move one block. Find the one on your list that answers what you do and where you go, and drag it up to number two. Everything it displaces stays in the same order, one place further down, and none of it is any worse off.
That is the whole job. One block, ten minutes, no new website. And if the right block was already sitting at number two, then somebody did think about this after all, and the correct thing to do about this article is nothing.
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