I’ve been talking with a client who wants some changes made to her home page. She has a lot of ideas and pointed me to several other competitor sites for examples of the sorts of things she wanted. However, while her home page can likely be improved by some redesigning, the question nagging at me is “should it be redesigned?”

Her home page has an overall bounce rate of around 30-35%. The bounce rate from Google is about 12%, and the average time on page is around a minute (there’s quite a lot of content) so clearly it is doing something right.

Sure, I could refresh the colors and move some content around. But is this a good use of my time and her money when the home page represents 20-25% of page views?

Yes, that’s a lot for a single page. However, when the other pages on her site represent over 75% of pageviews, it makes sense to spend most of my time on their maintenance and improvement rather than on the home page.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. It’s a small site, so almost all of those pages play an important in driving business.

However, I don’t remember when some of these other pages haven’t had their content updated. And, visually very little has been done from a design standpoint. This is why I tried to explain that her home page is actually far less important than she thinks.