Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Every web design guru will tell you the same thing: your homepage needs a hero banner, featured products section, testimonials, and maybe some company values thrown in for good measure. I used to follow this playbook religiously when building ecommerce sites for clients.
Then I worked with a client who had over 1,000 products and conversion rates were bleeding. Their beautiful, perfectly structured homepage was getting tons of traffic, but people were bouncing faster than a rubber ball on concrete. The data was brutal: visitors would land on the homepage, immediately click "All Products," then get lost in an endless scroll.
That's when I decided to break every "best practice" rule in the book. Instead of optimizing the existing structure, I turned their homepage into their product catalog. The result? Conversion rate doubled.
Here's what you'll learn from this experiment:
Why traditional homepage layouts fail with large product catalogs
How to structure feature sections when you have 1000+ SKUs
The psychology behind reducing friction in user journeys
When to ignore industry "best practices" completely
Practical implementation steps for website redesigns
Industry Reality
What every ecommerce owner has been told
Walk into any web design agency and they'll show you the same homepage blueprint. It's become so standardized that most ecommerce sites look like carbon copies of each other.
The Traditional Ecommerce Homepage Formula:
Hero banner with your main value proposition
"Featured Products" or "Best Sellers" section
"Shop by Category" grid
Customer testimonials and social proof
Company story or values section
This structure exists because it works well for stores with 20-50 products. When you have a curated selection, highlighting "featured" items makes sense. The homepage becomes a showcase, like a boutique window display.
But here's where conventional wisdom breaks down: this approach assumes people want to be guided through a curated experience. It assumes they're willing to browse through your carefully selected featured products before finding what they actually want.
The reality is different. When you have hundreds or thousands of products, visitors don't want curation - they want discovery. They don't want your "featured" items - they want to find their specific need quickly. Every extra click between them and your full catalog is friction that costs conversions.
Most agencies double down on this broken approach by adding more sections, more featured categories, more "ways to shop." They're essentially putting more barriers between visitors and what they're actually looking for.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The client was a B2C ecommerce store on Shopify with over 1,000 products. When I first looked at their analytics, the story was clear but painful: their homepage was the most visited page on the site, but it was also functioning as nothing more than a glorified doorway.
Here's what was happening: visitors would land on the beautifully designed homepage, glance at the "featured products" (which represented maybe 0.5% of their catalog), then immediately click "View All Products" to access the full inventory. Once there, they'd get overwhelmed by the endless scroll and leave.
The homepage had become irrelevant to the actual shopping experience. It was like having a beautiful lobby in a building where everyone immediately asks for directions to somewhere else.
The Traditional Approach I Tried First:
My initial instinct was to optimize within the existing framework. I improved the featured product selection, added more category highlights, made the hero banner more compelling. We A/B tested headlines, rearranged sections, added urgency elements.
Results? Marginal improvements at best. The fundamental problem remained: we were making visitors take extra steps to reach what they wanted.
The breakthrough came when I analyzed the user flow data more carefully. I noticed something obvious but ignored: the most successful user journeys bypassed the homepage entirely. People who landed directly on product pages or category pages via search or ads converted much better.
That's when I realized we were solving the wrong problem. Instead of trying to make the homepage a better gateway to products, what if we made the homepage the destination itself?
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
The solution was counterintuitive: eliminate the traditional homepage structure entirely and display products directly. Instead of "featured products," show 48 actual products from the catalog right on the homepage.
Here's exactly what I implemented:
1. Replaced Hero Section with Product Grid
Removed the traditional hero banner and replaced it with an immediate product display. No more "Shop Now" buttons pointing elsewhere - the shopping experience started instantly.
2. Built AI-Powered Navigation System
Created a mega-menu with 50+ categories, powered by an AI workflow that automatically sorted new products into the right categories. This meant customers could browse the full catalog without ever leaving the navigation.
3. Strategic Content Placement
Added only one additional element after the product grid: a testimonials section. This provided social proof without cluttering the primary shopping experience.
4. Mobile-First Product Discovery
Optimized the product grid for thumb-friendly mobile browsing, since most traffic was mobile. Each product card included essential information without requiring additional clicks.
The philosophy shift was crucial: instead of treating the homepage as a marketing page that leads to shopping, I treated it as the shopping experience itself.
Implementation Details:
The technical execution required restructuring the entire Shopify theme. I rebuilt the homepage template to pull products dynamically from the catalog, ensuring fresh inventory was always displayed. The AI categorization workflow integrated with Shopify's API to automatically tag new products.
Most importantly, I optimized for speed. With 48 products loading on the homepage, page performance was critical. I implemented lazy loading for product images and optimized the grid layout for fast rendering.
This wasn't just a design change - it was a complete rethinking of how an ecommerce homepage should function when you have a large catalog.
Mobile Optimization
Designed thumb-friendly product cards with essential info visible without additional taps, crucial since 70% of traffic was mobile.
AI Categorization
Built automated workflow to sort new products into 50+ categories, making navigation comprehensive without manual maintenance.
Performance Focus
Implemented lazy loading and optimized grid rendering to maintain fast load times despite displaying 48 products on homepage.
Social Proof Placement
Added single testimonials section after product grid to provide trust signals without disrupting the shopping flow.
The transformation was immediate and dramatic. Within two weeks of implementing the new homepage structure, we saw measurable improvements across all key metrics.
Conversion Rate Impact:
The overall conversion rate doubled from the previous baseline. More importantly, the homepage reclaimed its position as the most valuable page on the site, not just the most visited.
User Behavior Changes:
Session duration increased significantly because people were actually shopping on the homepage instead of just passing through it. Bounce rate decreased as visitors found products immediately rather than getting frustrated with extra navigation steps.
Unexpected Benefits:
The AI-powered categorization system meant new products were automatically discoverable without manual curation. This removed a bottleneck from their product launch process and ensured no inventory was hidden from customers.
The biggest surprise was how this affected their SEO. Google began treating the homepage as a product discovery page, which improved their rankings for product-related keywords. The homepage started appearing in search results for specific product categories.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experiment taught me that "best practices" often become worst practices when you scale beyond their original context. Here are the key insights:
Industry standards are starting points, not finish lines - What works for a 20-product boutique fails for a 1,000-product catalog
Friction kills conversions - Every extra click between intent and action costs you customers
Your homepage should be your destination, not your lobby - Don't make people ask for directions to where they want to go
Data beats design opinions - User behavior patterns matter more than aesthetic preferences
Automation enables personalization at scale - AI categorization made comprehensive navigation possible without manual overhead
Mobile-first thinking changes everything - Thumb-friendly design isn't just nice-to-have, it's essential for conversion
Performance and conversion are inseparable - Fast loading times become critical when displaying more products
When This Approach Works Best:
This strategy is most effective for stores with large, diverse catalogs where discovery is more important than curation. It's perfect for businesses where customers come looking for specific items rather than browsing for inspiration.
When to Avoid This Approach:
Don't use this for luxury brands, high-consideration purchases, or stores with small, curated selections where the shopping experience should feel more boutique-like.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies, apply this same principle to feature pages:
Display key features immediately instead of hiding them behind "Learn More" buttons
Use interactive demos directly on landing pages rather than gating them
Organize features by user workflow, not company structure
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores with large catalogs:
Test homepage-as-catalog for product discovery
Implement AI-powered categorization for automated organization
Optimize for mobile-first product browsing experience