Your homepage tells three stories at once.
A stranger will finish none of them.
I finally got to the Yuval Noah Harari talk that aired in the Ezra Klein Show, and one thing he said has been with me since.
Harari said the AIs that already changed human behaviour are not the clever ones. They're primitive. A social feed algorithm has one goal: engagement. It has been running on all of us for years. It learned which buttons produce more scrolling. Fear and outrage, mostly. It presses them all day.
Harari's word for this is hacked. Taste the phrase: your attention was hacked.
Test it on yourself. You opened the social media app to watch one video someone sent you. How long were you in there? Did you decide to stay that long?
Whatever that number was, your homepage gets under a second of the same attention. I've written that number here before. It hasn't stopped being true.
That's the state your visitor arrives in. Attention already farmed by systems far better at it than your website will ever be.
So look at what most homepages do with that second.
Book a demo. Start a free trial. Download the report. Three buttons pointing three ways, bidding for the same thin slice of attention. Then the proof layer underneath: award badges and four statistics proving how well the product works.
Every one of those was added by someone trying to help. Together they cancel each other out.
Nobody complains about a crowded homepage. They just leave, and your analytics file it as a bounce with no reason attached.
Your visitor's brain reads clutter before it reads words. A page that asks for three things asks for nothing. A page that shouts its proof from six places reads like it doesn't trust its own case.
Harari's other point was about stories. Stories move people. Numbers only confirm what a story has already sold them. We pile on numbers when we don't quite believe our own first sentence.
Your visitor won't sort through all of that. They'll take one story, or nothing.
So open your page and start cutting until one story is left, with one thing to do at the end. Then look at what you cut and ask how much of it was ever for the visitor.
Featured image: The Melodrama, an oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Honoré Daumier
