How to make your homepage cater to short attention spans

The opinions expressed by entrepreneurs contributors are their own.

Building a business usually means catering to a specific demographic and creating new products and angles to appeal to them directly. But there is one audience segment that all modern business owners need to think about when creating one: users with low attention spans.

Evidence is mixed on whether attention spans shorten over time due to technological interactions or not. But the human attention span has never been so long or impressive to begin with.

If you want your messaging to be more effective or if you want users to interact with your website, you need to think about ways to make your content user-friendly.

How do you do it?

Create an awesome homepage

If someone with a low attention span visits your website, there is no guarantee that they will spend a lot of time exploring your internal pages. They will probably never go past the homepage. The homepage is the only page that some of your users will see, so it should be your top priority. Proactively load your homepage with all the most important content you want new users to see; you can still direct users to internal pages, but you won't be exclusively reliant on that progress.

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If your business is well suited for this, you can even create a dedicated one-page design for your site. Creating and managing a single page can save you time and money while ensuring that all of your users get only the content that matters most to them. However, this approach is not suitable for all websites, especially if you plan to develop a blog or offer many different products or services.

Put your best content above the fold

Likewise, it's a good idea to put your best content above the fold. In the context of newspaper printing, "above the fold" was a literal term, prompting publishers to put some of their best content front and center. With users with low attention spans, there is no guarantee that users will consistently scroll or explore different pages. Therefore, you should keep your best content and hottest offers at the top of every page.

Keep everything concise

Don't waste time. Keep all content on your website as concise as possible:

Securities. Your titles should contain as few words as possible, conveying as much meaning as possible in the smallest possible space. If your titles are too long or convoluted, you will lose your audience. Body content. Your body content should also be concise and sufficiently spaced out. Consider writing short sentences, forming short paragraphs, with line breaks between each line. This will make your content much more appealing to users with low attention spans and make your content more readable at the same time. Videos. Any videos you have should be no longer than a few minutes – 10 minutes at most. Use frequent but short calls to action

Calls to action (CTAs) drive revenue for your site, so they happen to be one of the most important components of your long-term success. If you want these prompts to be effective for people with low attention spans, you should include them as often as possible without resorting to spamming. Compensate for this by making your prompts short and to the point. For example, a single call sentence can be effective if you include a sentence at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end of your main content.

Never ask too much of your users

There are many subtle ways to increase your conversion rate, but one of the most important tactics for people with poor attention spans is to avoid asking too much. People are easily willing to abandon their shopping carts or bail out a form if the intera...