A homepage redesign feels like progress. New layout, fresh copy, maybe a rebrand. But before you spend anything, there is one question worth asking first: are people actually reading what’s already there?

The problem, in plain terms

Most homepage redesigns are ordered for the wrong reason. The owner looks at the page, decides it feels tired, and commissions a rebuild. What they rarely check is whether the page is failing because of what’s on it, or because nobody is reaching it in the first place.

Those are two completely different problems. One is a design problem. The other is a traffic problem. A redesign fixes neither one if you’ve diagnosed the wrong one.

Here is how to find out which you have, using Google Analytics 4, the free analytics tool that most websites are already connected to.

Step one: is anyone arriving at the page?

Open GA4 and run a page-level view count for the URL you are thinking about redesigning. You want 90 days of data so you’re not reading noise.

Go to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens. Filter by the exact page path. The number you want is Views.

If that number is in the dozens over 90 days, stop. The page is not losing customers. It simply has no traffic. Redesigning it is wasted effort. Deleting it and redirecting the URL to a page that does get traffic is often the right call instead of commissioning a design pass.

A page with twelve views in three months is not a conversion problem. It’s invisible. Fix the visibility first.

Step two: are visitors reaching the important parts?

If the page does have meaningful traffic and you still suspect it’s not working, check scroll depth before you assume the layout is the issue.

GA4 fires a scroll event automatically when a user reaches 90% of a page’s length. To see it, go to Reports → Engagement → Events and look for the event named scroll. Cross-reference it against the number of sessions on that page.

The gap between sessions and scroll events is the number of people who arrived and left before reaching the bottom 10% of the page. On a long homepage with a lot of sections, that gap is almost always large. The question is how large.

Here is the arithmetic. Run it on your own numbers:

  • Sessions on the page over 90 days: call that A
  • Scroll events (90% depth) on the same page over 90 days: call that B
  • B divided by A, multiplied by 100, gives you the scroll-through rate as a percentage

If that rate is very low, most visitors are leaving before they see your testimonials, your pricing signals, your call to action. The question then is whether the content itself is the problem, or whether the right content is simply buried too far down.

What the data actually showed on a real page

On one homepage we looked at, GA4 showed 97 scroll events across 42 users over 90 days. Most visitors were leaving well before the lower sections. The page had eleven sections. Several of them were trying to say something to everyone: general audiences, different buyer types, different objections, all on one page.

The fix wasnt a redesign. It was surgery. Eleven sections became five. Each remaining section was given one clear point and one only. The sections with video proof and social proof, the ones visitors actually care about early, were moved up the page to where people were still scrolling before they left.

The page now speaks to one specific reader. It tests one hypothesis at a time instead of trying to cover everything. That is a different brief from “make it look better”, and it costs a fraction of a full rebuild.

Three options when your page isn’t converting

Do nothing and fix the traffic first. If views are low, no homepage change will move the needle. Spend the same budget on search visibility, a Google Business Profile, or a few pages of content that can actually be found. The homepage can wait.

Buy an off-the-shelf template and swap in your content. Tools like Squarespace or Framer have templates built around conversion patterns. If your current page is structurally broken, a template can solve that for a few hundred pounds and an afternoon. This is a reasonable call if the content is good but the layout is working against it.

Run a surgical edit based on what the data shows. This is what we did on the page above. Read the scroll data, identify where people leave, move the most persuasive content above that point, cut everything that is not earning its place. No new brand, no new photography, no rebuild. Just fewer sections, in the right order, saying one thing each.

The honest recommendation: check the traffic number first. If it’s low, dont touch the page yet. If traffic is there but scroll depth is poor, a surgical edit beats a full redesign almost every time, because it tests one change at a time and you can see whether it worked.

Before you commission anything

Pull the two numbers: page views over 90 days, and scroll events over the same window. Five minutes in GA4. The answer will tell you whether you have a design problem, a traffic problem, or no problem at all on that page.

If you’d like us to look at one page with you, name what’s wrong with it, and say which fix is worth doing, that’s a conversation we’re happy to have. See what that looks like on our services page.