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Before they know you
An almost wordless home page works for a company everybody already knows. Yours gets read by somebody who has never heard your name, in a hurry, with two other tabs open.
About 11 minutes
The short version
Somebody has a blocked drain, or a light that will not come back on, or a back that has stopped working properly. They typed something into their phone, they have tapped the third result down, and now they are on your website. They have two other names open in two other tabs.
That person is not reading your home page. They are checking it against a question, and the question is short: is this the right sort of business, and does it come to me. Everything on the first screen is either answering that or standing in front of it.
And they are quick about it. You know how quick from the other side: think about the last time you went looking for a business on your phone, and how much patience you extended to the ones that did not immediately look right.
They are not reading it.
They never were.
They are checking it against
one question, and then leaving.
Open almost any small service business website on a phone and the first screen is a photograph, the business name, and a line underneath about quality, or trust, or how long the business has been going. It is warm, it is nicely set, and it was written by somebody who assumed the reader already knew what they had opened.
Not one word of it answers the question the visitor came with. And that is a strange thing for the most valuable screen you own to be doing.
Do this now if your phone is near you, because it takes two minutes and it is more convincing than anything I can write about it. Open the supermarket you shop at. Then your bank. Then the one you stream television from, and the one you order dinner through. Look at the first screen of each and do not scroll.
You will find a search box, or a field waiting for your address, or a place to sign in, and hardly any words at all. A handful on each screen. And not one of those companies tells you what it does.
I could give you an average word count for those screens. It would be invented, and so is every average you have been shown for them, including the one that came back in the research behind this article. Count five yourself instead, and the finding is yours rather than somebody’s.
The obvious lesson is write less, and it is the wrong lesson. Those companies have spent decades making certain you arrive already knowing what they sell, so the name at the top is doing the work a sentence would otherwise have to do. When a business everybody knows writes eight words up there, the other forty are still there. They are in the customer’s head, and they were paid for in advertising.
The other half of that experiment is the interesting one. Go and look at businesses in exactly those same trades whose names mean nothing to you. A bank you have never banked with, a phone company you have not heard of, an insurer that started advertising last year.
Their first screens are longer, and every one of them tells you what the company is. Not because their designers are worse. Because they cannot afford the silence, and they know it.
Brevity at the top of a home page is not a style. It is a thing you buy, and the price is that everybody already knows your name.
None of which is an argument against learning from very large businesses. They are worth copying on plenty of things, and a separate piece here is about the ones worth copying. How few words they use is simply not one of them.
There is a small vocabulary that turns up at the top of small service business websites, over and over, in the same slot.
You have read these before
You have read them on other trade websites, probably this week. There is a reason they cluster, and it is duller and more forgivable than bad writing: they were in the template.
A website builder ships its trade themes with the top of the page already filled in, because an empty box is frightening and a gallery of empty boxes does not sell templates. So the sentence arrives written. The owner changes the number of years, decides the rest sounds about right, and publishes. Nobody sat down and chose those words. They came in the box, the same way the running order did.
And you can settle whether yours is one of them without taking anybody’s word for it. Copy the sentence at the top of your home page, put quote marks around both ends, and search for it. If the results fill up with other businesses saying it exactly, you have your answer in about fifteen seconds.
Those sentences are probably all true of you. You may well be family owned and operated, passionate about doing the job properly, and twenty years in. The trouble is that they are equally true of the two other names in the two other tabs, which is a different fault from being false and a worse one here. A stranger is not on your first screen to find out whether you are good. They are there to find out which sort of business you are.
A sentence that would still read perfectly with a competitor’s name over it is not your first sentence. It is the space where one should be.
The instinct that a business ought to have a slogan is very strong, so it is worth saying plainly what sits underneath it. I went looking for evidence that a slogan on a small business website does anything measurable at all, and could not find any. Not weak evidence. None.
That is not proof a slogan hurts you and I am not going to dress it up as one. It means the confident advice you were given about needing a memorable line was somebody repeating a habit. On a screen with room for about fifteen words, spending four of them on something nobody has shown to do anything is worth deciding on purpose rather than by default.
What goes in the block after the first screen is a separate argument with a separate answer: on a phone your home page is a queue. This one is only about the sentence at the front of it.
One of them wants it short, and that instinct is not stupid. A short line sits better over a photograph, it looks composed, it fits the space the template left for it, and it is the version that survives being shown to everybody in the family.
The other one is a stranger at nine at night typing emergency plumber and the name of their suburb into a phone with one hand. Behind that stranger is the machine choosing which pages to put in front of them, and increasingly a second machine that answers the question out loud without showing anybody a list at all.
Those two want different sentences. It is a real conflict, and it usually gets resolved in favour of the short line for one dull reason: the short line is the one in the room when the decision is made.
This is not a matter of opinion, which is unusual and worth using. Google’s own documentation for site owners says to use words that people would use to look for your content, and to place those words in prominent locations on the page, such as the title and main heading of a page. That is their wording, not a summary of it, and the page was last updated in December 2025.
The same documentation says the heading at the top of a page is one of the things Google uses to work out the blue line it prints in the search results. So the sentence at the top of your home page is doing two jobs at once. It is what a stranger reads, and it is part of what gets shown to the next stranger before they have read anything.
The company that sends you most of your customers has written down where to put the words those customers use. It is the least ambiguous instruction in this entire subject.
It is duller than the one you have now, and it uses the words a customer would use rather than the ones your trade uses.
Committed to quality workmanship since 2004
Blocked drains and hot water repairs in Frankston, seven days
Your trusted local electrical solutions provider
Licensed electrician for homes and small business, across Toowoomba
Where your recovery comes first
Physiotherapy for backs, knees and sports injuries in Geelong
Those are not lines to copy. They are the shape: what, where, and one fact. Yours will be worse than these if you write it to sound like these, and better than these if you write it the way you would say it to somebody standing in front of you.
The fear behind the clever line is that the plain one sounds cheap, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance. I cannot show you a study proving a plain heading costs you nothing in how you are perceived. Nobody has produced one showing it costs anything either, and the plain version is doing a job the clever one is not.
Which is as far as the evidence goes, so here is the judgement on top of it. Sounding like a proper business is worth something at the moment somebody is choosing between three of you. It is worth nothing four seconds earlier, when they still do not know whether you do the job they need doing.
Ten minutes, on your own phone, on your own home page. They get harder as they go down, and the last one needs somebody else in the room. Nothing here gets scored and there is nothing to send anybody.
Number four catches people out. Owners who cannot write a headline to save themselves will answer the phone with a perfect one, because on the phone there is a real person waiting and no temptation to sound like a brand.
Nobody arriving has heard of you.
So tell them what you do.The second one. Ten seconds, no phone required, and the only one of the five that can be failed instantly and without argument. If nothing goes wrong when you put a competitor’s name in front of your own opening sentence, that is the finding.
Almost everything else on a website costs money to fix. A photograph has to be taken, a page has to be rebuilt, somebody has to be paid. This one does not. It is a sentence, in the one place where a sentence is worth something, and changing it is a box and a save button.
You do not have to invent it either. You have said it out loud several thousand times to people who rang up needing an answer, and it comes out in the right order every time because somebody is on the other end waiting for it. That is the sentence. It has just never been written down.
Put it at the top, with the places you go after it. Then the rest of your website can get back to what it is good at, which is everything that happens once a stranger has decided you are the right sort of business to be ringing.
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