Most visitors never see the bottom half of your homepage

In short: A homepage is read in order, and most visitors stop early. On our own agency site, the average visit ended about a screen and a half in, just before the work we’re proudest of. We didn’t redesign anything. We decided what the first two screens were for and moved one section up. If your homepage has grown one reasonable section at a time, it’s worth checking where your own line falls.

The number that stayed with me

In July we ran a full audit of dthree.com.ph, our own agency site. Speed, search, structure, all of it. The number I kept coming back to was a small one: average scroll depth on the homepage, 13.2%, across about 1,500 visits a month.

Thirteen percent sounds abstract until you turn it into screens. Our homepage was about twelve screens long on a laptop, with fifteen sections. Thirteen percent of that is a screen and a half.

So the average visit saw our headline, a strip of project screenshots and the top of our client list. Featured work, the section that actually shows what we do, started just past that point. The services, the process, the invitation to get in touch and the articles sat further down still, read mostly by us.

People do scroll

The easy conclusion is that people don’t scroll anymore. I don’t think that’s quite it. We all scroll all day. We scroll when we believe the next thing is worth it.

Nielsen Norman Group’s eyetracking research puts some shape on this. People spent about 57% of their viewing time on the first screen of a page and about 74% within the first two. Attention thins out quickly after that, and it comes back mainly for people who’ve already decided you’re relevant.

Nielsen Norman Group explains the idea in a few minutes:

Someone landing on a homepage usually hasn’t decided yet. They came from a search result, a referral or a LinkedIn post, and they’re answering one quiet question: is this the right kind of team for me? The first screen and a half has to answer it. The other ten screens get read by the people who already said yes.

How a homepage fills up

Nobody sets out to hide their best work. You’ve probably sat in the meeting where it happens.

Someone asks for the client logos near the top, because trust matters. Someone else wants an intro paragraph so people know who we are. Then a services grid, because that’s what we sell, and a second one for the other half of the business. Then a process section, because clients keep asking about it. Each request is reasonable, and each one wins in the meeting where it’s raised.

What rarely happens is someone scrolling the whole page, top to bottom, and reading it as one list in order of importance. That’s what a homepage is, whether anyone planned it or not. The first position is seen by almost everyone. The eighth is seen by very few.

What we changed

We didn’t redesign anything. We asked a narrower question: what does someone need to see in the first two screens to decide we’re worth a message?

For us the answer was the work. So Featured work moved up, from below the client list to right after the headline and the screenshot strip. It now starts about 10% of the way down on a laptop, and just after the first screen on a phone. The client list sits underneath, so it backs up what you’ve just seen.

Is it working? Honestly, too early to say. We recently added a cookie consent banner, and it keeps session recording off until a visitor agrees, so our scroll data now covers only the people who say yes. I’d rather wait for a clean read than draw a trend through a partial one. What I can say is that the section most likely to win us work no longer sits just past the point where the average visit stops.

I did the same on this site earlier this month. On a phone, my projects were more than halfway down the homepage, below the writing and the services. They now start about two fifths of the way down, and the page is nearly three screens shorter.

Check your own homepage in ten minutes

You don’t need an audit for a first read. You need two numbers.

1. Find your average scroll depth. Microsoft Clarity is free and reports it for each page. GA4’s built-in scroll event only fires at 90%, so it tells you who finished, not where everyone else stopped. If your site asks for cookie consent, either tool may only see visitors who accept, so treat the number as a sample.
2. Count your homepage in screens. Scroll it on your own phone and count the full screens down to the footer.
3. Draw the line. Multiply the two. A 15% scroll depth on a ten-screen page means the average visit sees a screen and a half.
4. Look at what’s above it. For each section above the line, ask whether it helps someone decide you’re right for them. If your strongest proof sits below it, move that up before you rewrite or add anything.

The sections below the line still earn their place. The people who read all the way down are often your best leads. They just can’t be the ones carrying the first impression.

A homepage is a ranking

I used to think of a homepage as a table of contents: everything the business does, in a sensible order. I think of it now as a ranking, where the order is a business decision rather than a layout one.

It’s changed the question I bring to reviews. When someone proposes a new section, I ask what it would push below the line, and whether we’re all fine with that. Sometimes we are. I’d just like it to be a decision somebody made on purpose.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on where your own line falls, it’s one of the first things we look at on any project at Dthree, and I’m always happy to talk it through.

Quick questions, quick answers

What’s a good average scroll depth for a homepage?

There isn’t a universal benchmark I’d trust. It depends on the page’s length, where visitors come from and what the page is for. It’s more useful to turn your own number into screens and look at what sits inside them.

Should I just make my homepage shorter?

Not necessarily. Order matters more than length. A long page with the right first two screens works better than a short page with the wrong ones, and the lower sections still serve visitors who are already interested.

Where should the call to action go if most people never reach the bottom?

Near the top and at the bottom. A visible contact link in the navigation and the first screen catches people who’ve already decided, and the closing invitation catches people who read everything. On our site the closing one sits past the halfway mark, so it can’t be the only one.

What about visitors who never see the homepage?

Plenty of them never land on your homepage at all. They arrive on an article, a service page or a link someone sent, which is its own design problem. This post is about the ones who do start at the front, and for most service businesses that’s still where first impressions are formed.