The Only Three Questions Your Homepage Has to Answer

Ask an owner what the homepage should say and you get a long list: the story, the chef, the sourcing, the terrace, the awards, the private room, the new brunch, the gift vouchers.

All of it is true. None of it is the job of the first screen.

A first-time visitor arrives with three questions, and they ask them in this order.

1. What is this place?

Not your values. Not your founding year. The category, the location and the register, in one line a stranger can repeat to a friend.

"A wood-fired neighbourhood pizzeria in Alfama" does this. "Where passion meets tradition" does not — it could be a restaurant, a winery, a gym or a bank.

The test is simple: could this sentence belong to a competitor? If yes, it is decoration, not information.

2. Is it for me?

Price level, occasion and atmosphere. A visitor deciding on an anniversary dinner and one deciding on a quick lunch are looking for opposite signals, and both will leave if they cannot tell which one you are.

You do not need a price list on the homepage. You need enough — a menu link with visible prices one tap away, photographs that show how people are dressed, a line about whether you take walk-ins.

Hiding price to avoid scaring people off does not work. It scares off the people who would have been fine with it and wastes the time of those who would not.

3. How do I go?

Booking, hours, address. Visible without scrolling, on a phone.

This is the one that gets designed away most often, because it is the least interesting part to design. It is also the only part that produces revenue.

Then, and only then, the story

Once those three are answered, everything else becomes an asset rather than an obstacle. The visitor who knows what you are, that you suit them and how to come is exactly the visitor who wants to read about your sourdough starter.

The mistake is putting the starter first.

An exercise

Print your homepage as it appears on a phone, above the fold. Cover the logo. Hand it to someone who has never been.

Ask them: what kind of place is this, roughly what does dinner cost, and how would you book?

If they cannot answer all three, the fix is not more content. It is putting the answers where the questions are.

Why this matters more than it used to

Attention at the top of the funnel keeps shortening, and an increasing share of first impressions happen through summaries — a search result, a map card, an AI answer — that pull whatever is most prominent and structured on your page.

A homepage that states plainly what it is, who it suits and how to book gives all of those systems something accurate to repeat. A homepage that opens with a mood statement gives them nothing, and they will fill the gap with something else.