Win Report: How a simpler homepage increased sales by 24%

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how simplifying the copy and layout of a homepage increased conversions by 24%.

Side by side comparison of the original and new The Raw Honey Shop homepage. The new version’s copy and layoung it simplied.

The Raw Honey Shop sells raw, single-source honey from artisan beekeepers in remote areas. Every jar is personally selected by the company’s founder, and the range runs to more than 40 varieties.

Research: Everything visitors needed was on the homepage, but that was the problem

As part of our initial research, we ran usability tests on The Raw Honey Shop, and asked screened participants to rate the site alongside two other specialist competitors. The Raw Honey Shop won on substance, with testers rating it as the most informative and singling out the beekeeper profiles and the depth of detail.

But when we asked which sites our testers would likely return to, The Raw Honey Shop dropped to third place.

A bar chart showing the likelihood testers would explore The Raw Honey Shop’s website further compared to two other competitors. The Raw Honey Shop receives a 3.2/5 rating, Competitor 1 receives 4.8/5, and Competitor 2 receives 4.0/5. In this case, 1 equals highly unlikely and 5 equals highly likely.

One participant summed up the feelings of many:

“The Raw Honey Shop felt a bit wordy, I wouldn’t want to trawl through an essay for information.”

The next score was even more uncomfortable. Despite having the deepest substance of the three, the site also came last on trustworthiness. To be clear, it wasn’t that the site lacked trust signals; it was the challenge of finding them:

“Probably trustworthy, but harder to tell from the info dump.”

“I’d rather close it for a clearer site.”

In other words, the participants were judging the digging more than they were judging the site. They hadn’t completed their mental shopping list, and they weren’t alone. As is often the case, scrollmaps revealed how little of the real audience ever saw the site’s full content.

A scroll map of the original desktop and mobile homepage showcasing where the percentage of users that make it to a specific section on the page. 70% of desktop and 75% of mobile users scroll past the average fold. 54% of desktop 32% of mobile users see the subscription box. 50% of desktop users see the products section.

50% of desktop users did not scroll far enough to even see the products.

Clarity of offer is one of the most common value-proposition issues we encounter, and as we’ve seen before, the effects of overwhelm are real.

How could we keep everything that made this business worth trusting, and still let someone take it in at a glance?

The original page (or control)

The original homepage led with long-form brand storytelling, scattering its key claims through more than a dozen short paragraphs and pushing the products well down the page.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we rebuilt the top of the homepage around the mental shopping list we’d expect any careful honey buyer to use. Is it the real thing? Who made it? Why should I believe you? And where do I buy it?

The new version of the homepage with simplified copy and layout.

Specifically, we:

Replaced the essay with a checklist: We cut the long-form brand story down to a headline, a summary, and one brief paragraph. The key claims moved into a list headed “Every jar we sell is,” each leading with its point in bold: raw and unheated, from pesticide-free landscapes, made by real beekeepers, and certified organic (or produced to organic principles). Visitors can easily check off their mental shopping list.
Tied the beekeeper’s photo to a claim: Antonio Simon’s photo already sat at the top of the original, but the copy didn’t mention him until partway down the story. In the variation, the checklist names him right beside his photo (“people like Antonio, who tends his hives in the Sierra del Rincón Biosphere Reserve”), so the face and the claim “made by real beekeepers” read as one piece of evidence.
Added a button to the shop: With half of desktop visitors never scrolling as far as the products, the variation adds a Shop our honeys button right under the checklist.

Most of what made the site worth trusting was already on the page. The variation stopped visitors from having to dig for it.

Result: Sales increased by 24%

During the test, we observed a 24% increase in sales (and an even larger increase in revenue per visitor).

Overwhelming pages charge a kind of tax to visitors for the privilege of reading them. In this case, the wall of text meant that visitors spent effort decoding instead of deciding.

Once we reduced the effort required to get the persuasive information… more people were persuaded.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of The Raw Honey Shop’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to The Raw Honey Shop for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

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