What sections should a website have? A short, honest list

"How many sections should a homepage have?" is the wrong question with a useful answer hiding behind it. The number is not the point. The point is that every section should be doing a job the one above it did not.

Most homepages fail that test somewhere around the fourth screen.

The four that nearly every site needs

The hero. One sentence on what you do and who for. Not a slogan — a sentence somebody could repeat to a colleague. The most common mistake here is writing for people who already know you.

The proof. Work, clients, numbers, or a quote from somebody real. This sits second because the reader's second question is always "says who".

The what. Services, products, or how it works. Three of them. Not nine.

The next step. One clear thing to do. A form, a number, a calendar, a price. Sites that end with "get in touch" and no mechanism are asking the reader to do the work.

That is a complete homepage. Everything after this is situational.

The ones that depend on what you sell

Pricing — if you can publish it, publish it. Hiding it filters out fewer bad enquiries than it loses good ones.

About — only if who you are affects the buying decision. For a studio, a clinic or a one-person business, it does, and it is often the second-most-read page. For a utility, nobody cares.

FAQ — the objections you hear on the phone, answered. Not invented questions. If you have never been asked it, it is not an FAQ, it is filler.

Process — worth a section when the thing you sell is long, expensive or frightening. Builders, dentists, agencies. Skip it if the purchase is small.

A map or hours — only if people physically come to you. Then it is not optional, and it should be right, including whether you are open at this moment.

The ones that are usually padding

• A second hero two screens down, saying the same thing in a different font.
• A logo wall with no story. Six logos prove nothing without a sentence about what you did for one of them.
• Team photos on a site with no team page. Either commit or leave it out.
• A blog teaser with two posts from 2023. An empty blog is worse than no blog — it is a visible sign that the site is not maintained.
• "Our values". Nobody has ever bought anything because of this section.

The order, and why

For most businesses: hero → proof → what → how it works → price → next step.

Proof goes above the detail because trust is the gate. A reader who does not believe you will not read your feature list, however good it is. This is also why testimonials at the very bottom of a page are close to wasted — they are answering a question the reader gave up on two screens earlier.

The exception is a product people already understand. If you sell something familiar, the shape of the purchase is the thing and proof can move down.

The test for any section

One question: what does this do that the section above it did not?

If you cannot answer in a sentence, it is padding. The commonest result of running this test honestly is a page one-third shorter and noticeably better, because the sections that remain stop competing with each other.

The second test, for the whole page: could somebody who has never heard of you say what you do after fifteen seconds? If not, the problem is in the first sentence, not in the sections further down.

A better pricing block, this afternoon. Sections sorted by the job they do rather than by how they look. Much of the shelf is free. Browse the sections.

Building them rather than writing them from scratch

Sections are the unit most people actually need. A whole new site is rare; a better pricing block, an FAQ that opens properly, a footer that does more than sit there — that is the weekly job.

The DragGo Market is mostly sections for that reason, sorted by the job they do rather than by how they look, and a large part of the shelf is free.