The Seven Second Test

Somebody arrives on your homepage. They have not read anything yet. In the time it takes to decide whether a room is the right room, your website visitor will answer three questions.

What is this? Is it for me? Can I trust it?

If any answer is unclear, they leave, and they do not leave angrily. They leave the way you leave a shop you have wandered into by mistake, with no strong feeling and no memory of it.

You can run this test on your own site in a minute, though you will need somebody else to do it, because you cannot un-know what your business does.

Find a person who does not work with you. Open your laptop, and show them your homepage for seven seconds. Put down the screen lid of the laptop. Ask them what the business does, who it is for, and whether they would trust it with a meaningful job.

You'll be surprised. Not because the answers are wrong, but because they are thin. "Something with technology?" "Business services, I think?" "Looked professional." That last one is not a compliment. It means the design carried the whole load and the words did nothing.

Three failures cause nearly all of this.

The abstract headline. The largest text on the page describes an outcome so general it could belong to any business in any industry. "Building better futures." "Where strategy meets execution." "We help you grow." These are not statements, they are moods. You want to be saying the actual thing: what you make or do, for whom. Specific reads as confident. Vague reads as either large and impersonal, or small and unsure. Neither helps you.

The hidden qualifier. You serve a particular kind of client and you have not said so. A firm that is excellent with family-owned manufacturers, and says only "we work with businesses", has thrown away its best asset. Naming your customer does not shrink your market. It makes the right people feel found and lets the wrong ones self-select out, which saves you the calls you did not want.

Trust deferred. The evidence that you are good sits on a separate page that only a small minority of visitors will ever open. Client names, a specific result, a recognisable logo, a real photograph of real work: some of that belongs on the first screen.

There is a version of this chapter that just says "make your value proposition clearer", and it is useless, because everybody already agrees with it in principle and nobody can see their own vagueness. So use the test instead.

Try the test. Seven seconds, a stranger, three questions. It is the cheapest research you will ever run and it will tell you more than a month of analytics that has a high bounce rate.