USP hero and shorter homepage: +16% visits to demo page
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsA homepage with a USP-led hero, a clear CTA and fewer low-value sections lifted visits to the Contact Us (demo) page from 13.25% to 15.45%, a gain of about 16%.
POSist, a restaurant point-of-sale software company now called Restroworks, ran this split URL test itself, and it was published as a VWO case study.
Hero copy, page length and site speed all changed together.
- Homepage to Contact Us page rate: 15.45% versus 13.25%, a relative lift of about 16%.
- Sample size, duration and confidence were not shared.
- This was the first of a series of tests. Later homepage and contact page tests added further gains.
The change
USP headline and CTA added to the hero; low-value sections removed.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The original POSist homepage, with its earlier hero and the full set of page sections.
Variant
The hero gained a headline stating the USP and a clear call to action. Sections that heatmaps and recordings showed to be low value were removed to shorten the scroll, and the site was tuned to load faster.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- A clear USP in the hero tells restaurant owners right away why this software is different.
- A clear CTA gives visitors an obvious next step toward a demo.
- Cutting sections visitors ignored put the useful content closer to the top.
- faster load likely helped too, but its effect can't be separated here.
Caveats: Bundled test: hero copy, CTA, page length and performance improvements shipped together. The metric is visits to the contact page, not demo requests, and sample size and duration were not shared. Data is from 2018.
Who ran it
POSist ran this test and published the results (VWO case study). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on POSist →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we lead our homepage hero with a clear USP and CTA and cut sections visitors ignore, then more visitors will go to our demo page because the value and next step are obvious sooner.
- Primary metric
- Homepage to demo or contact page click-through rate
- Guardrails
- Demo request submissions
- Demo-to-customer rate
- Homepage bounce rate
- Who should test it
- B2B SaaS companies whose homepage is long and whose main goal is demo requests. It may help less if your hero already states a sharp USP, or if most traffic lands on other pages.
Questions
What should a SaaS homepage hero include?
A headline that states what makes you different and one clear call to action.
POSist's version lifted visits to its demo page by about 16%.
Is a shorter homepage better for B2B SaaS?
Often, if the removed sections were ones visitors skipped.
Use heatmaps or scroll data to find them before you cut.
Should I test page speed separately?
If you can, yes. Here speed shipped with copy changes, so we can't tell how much each helped.