Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Last year, I watched a manager spend two full weeks obsessing over whether every heading on their site should start with a verb. Two weeks. While competitors were launching new features and capturing market share, this team was stuck in grammatical paralysis.
This wasn't an isolated incident. Throughout my freelance career building SaaS landing pages and ecommerce sites, I've seen this pattern repeatedly: managers focusing on the wrong priorities while their conversion rates stagnate.
When a Shopify client approached me about their massive product catalog problem—over 1000 products and bleeding conversions—I had to question everything I thought I knew about homepage structure. The traditional "feature page" approach wasn't just failing; it was actively hurting their business.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience breaking conventional feature page wisdom:
Why the "best practice" feature section layouts often kill conversions
The counter-intuitive homepage structure that doubled my client's conversion rate
How to turn your homepage into the catalog itself (and why this works)
When to completely abandon traditional website structure rules
A framework for testing bold design decisions that go against industry standards
Most businesses treat their website like a digital brochure when it should be treated as a marketing laboratory. The real breakthrough comes when you stop following frameworks and start testing what actually works for your specific audience.
Industry Reality
What every design blog preaches about feature pages
Pick up any web design blog or "best practices" guide, and you'll find the same recycled advice about feature page structure. The industry has crystallized around a few sacred patterns that everyone treats as gospel.
The Standard Feature Page Formula:
Hero section with value proposition
"Featured Products" or "Featured Services" section
"How It Works" with 3-step process
Social proof testimonials
"Our Collections" or feature categories
Call-to-action footer
This approach exists because it's safe. It's what worked for successful companies, so copying their layout feels like a smart strategy. Design agencies love these templates because they're easy to sell and quick to implement.
The conventional wisdom makes logical sense: guide users through a careful journey, showcase your best offerings first, build trust with social proof, then ask for the conversion. It's textbook user experience design.
But here's where this falls apart in practice: When everyone follows the same playbook, that playbook becomes noise. Your "best practice" feature page looks identical to your competitors. More importantly, these templates assume all businesses have the same user behavior patterns—which is completely false.
For businesses with complex catalogs, subscription models, or unique value propositions, the standard feature page structure can actually create more friction than it removes. Users aren't following your carefully designed flow; they're trying to find what they need as quickly as possible.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When this Shopify client approached me, they had built a successful business but were drowning in their own success. With over 1000 products in their catalog, their conversion rate was bleeding—not because the products were bad, but because finding the right one felt like searching for a needle in a digital haystack.
The data told a brutal story: visitors were using the homepage as nothing more than a doorway. They'd land, immediately click to "All Products," then get lost in an endless scroll. The carefully crafted homepage had become irrelevant.
My first instinct was to follow the playbook. I started optimizing the traditional elements: rewrote the hero section, improved the "Featured Products" curation, added better category descriptions. We saw marginal improvements, but nothing that moved the needle significantly.
The real breakthrough came when I analyzed their traffic flow more carefully. Users weren't following our intended journey at all. They wanted to browse products immediately, not read about the company story or value proposition. The traditional homepage structure was actually adding friction to their natural behavior.
That's when I realized we were treating symptoms, not the disease. The problem wasn't that our feature sections weren't compelling enough—it was that feature sections themselves were the wrong approach for this business model.
This client needed their homepage to function like a product catalog, not a company brochure. But every design reference I could find insisted on the importance of "proper" homepage hierarchy with distinct sections for different purposes.
I had to make a choice: follow industry best practices and achieve mediocre results, or break the rules and test something completely different.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
While every "best practices" guide preached about hero banners and featured collections, I went rogue. Here's exactly what I implemented and why it worked:
Step 1: Killed the Traditional Homepage Structure
I removed everything that stood between visitors and products:
Deleted the hero banner entirely
Removed "Featured Products" sections
Scrapped "Our Collections" blocks
Eliminated company story elements
Step 2: Created a Mega-Menu Navigation System
Instead of relying on homepage sections for discovery, I built an AI workflow to automatically categorize products across 50+ categories. This allowed users to find products without ever leaving the navigation menu.
Step 3: Transformed the Homepage Into a Product Gallery
The radical move: I displayed 48 products directly on the homepage. Not "featured" products or "best sellers"—just a smart grid of the actual catalog. The homepage became the product page.
The only additional element I kept was a testimonials section below the product grid, because social proof still mattered for conversion.
Step 4: Implemented Smart Product Rotation
Rather than static featured products, I created a system that rotated inventory based on:
Recent additions to keep content fresh
Seasonal relevance
Stock levels to prioritize available items
User behavior patterns from analytics
Step 5: Optimized for Mobile-First Browsing
Since most traffic was mobile, I designed the product grid to be thumb-friendly with quick-view options and streamlined add-to-cart functionality directly from the homepage.
This wasn't just a design change—it was a complete philosophical shift. Instead of trying to control the user journey, I designed around their actual behavior patterns.
Revolutionary Approach
Turning the homepage into the actual store instead of a gateway to the store
Mobile Optimization
Designing the product grid for thumb-friendly browsing with quick-view options and streamlined add-to-cart
Smart Categorization
Using AI workflows to automatically sort 1000+ products across 50+ categories without manual curation
Social Proof Integration
Maintaining testimonials below the product grid to build trust without interrupting the shopping flow
The outcome challenged everything I'd been taught about homepage design:
The homepage reclaimed its throne as the most viewed AND most used page. Previously, it was just a bounce-point to the product catalog. Now it was the catalog itself.
Conversion rate doubled. By removing friction and letting users shop immediately, we saw a dramatic improvement in purchase completion rates.
Time to purchase decreased significantly. Users no longer needed to navigate through multiple pages to start shopping. They could browse, compare, and buy directly from the first page they landed on.
The most surprising result was how this change affected user behavior patterns. Analytics showed that users were now spending more time on the site overall, exploring more products, and coming back more frequently. By making the homepage useful instead of promotional, we increased engagement across the board.
This experiment taught me that "best practices" are often just "common practices." When you have a unique challenge—like a massive product catalog—you need a unique solution. The core principle that drove this success wasn't following a framework; it was understanding that in ecommerce, friction kills conversions, and every extra click is a conversion killer.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons I learned from breaking every homepage "best practice":
Industry standards are starting points, not finish lines. When everyone follows the same playbook, differentiation comes from doing something different.
User behavior trumps design theory. What users actually do matters more than what design blogs say they should do.
Every business has unique constraints. A solution that works for a 10-product store might fail spectacularly for a 1000-product catalog.
Friction is the real conversion killer. Every additional step between landing and purchasing is an opportunity for users to leave.
Test boldly, measure carefully. The biggest improvements come from testing changes that feel risky, not safe optimizations.
Sometimes the best feature is no features. Instead of adding more sections, we improved by removing everything unnecessary.
Context matters more than templates. The right approach depends entirely on your specific business model and user needs.
The biggest mistake I see businesses make is optimizing within the constraints of "best practices" instead of questioning whether those practices serve their specific situation. Real breakthrough results come from understanding your users deeply enough to design for their actual behavior, not theoretical user journeys.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies, apply this thinking to your feature pages:
Test showing actual product functionality instead of marketing copy
Consider interactive demos over static feature lists
Let users try features directly from your homepage
Prioritize user onboarding flow over company storytelling
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores, especially with large catalogs:
Test product grids directly on homepage instead of featured sections
Implement smart categorization to handle navigation at scale
Optimize for mobile-first product browsing behavior
Consider homepage as your primary catalog, not a gateway