How much of your homepage is wasted?

If half of your website’s homepage is wasted on content your visitors don’t care about and ignore, it’s better than average.

That’s the unhappy finding of a recent study by Jakob Nielsen, reported at Homepage Real Estate Allocation.

According to Nielsen, a homepage should do three things:

1. Give users information.
   
2. Provide top-level navigation to additional information inside the site.
   
3. Tell users the site’s purpose and where they are relative to the Web as a whole.
   

In the study, 39% of the screen was used for these things. (And it’s been shrinking over time.) The rest?

… completely wasted on things users ignore: filler, self-promos, ads, and blank space. It seems that no matter how much research we present about the uselessness of stock photos, the fluffy areas of web pages grow every year.

Nonprofit websites tend to be a hodge-podge of wish-list material from departments and stakeholders all over the organization. The content donors want and need gets crowded out.

That means less engagement and fewer donations. The best websites put all the in-house wants behind those of external audiences.