Someone lands on your homepage carrying one question. Can this company do the specific thing I need, and who do I speak to about it. They did not arrive to learn about your journey since 1987, and they are not going to read a paragraph about your commitment to excellence to find out.
Most B2B homepages are built as though the visitor arrived with no question at all.
A B2B homepage is a routing decision
Think of the page as a junction rather than a cover. Every visitor arrives already holding an intent: they want a capability confirmed, a project like theirs found, a specification checked, a certification verified, or a phone number. The homepage’s job is to recognise the likely intents and route each one quickly. It is closer to a well-signed lobby than to the front of a brochure.
That reframing kills most of the arguments people have about homepages. The debate about whether the headline should say “engineering excellence” or “excellence in engineering” is not a debate about the homepage, because neither version routes anyone anywhere.
Nielsen Norman Group’s analysis of page-visit data puts the window plainly: users often leave web pages within 10 to 20 seconds, and holding someone for several minutes depends on communicating a clear value proposition within the first 10 seconds. A mission statement uses that window without spending it.
What is a homepage actually for?
It is for getting people off the homepage.
That sounds glib and it is the whole discipline. The measure of a good B2B homepage is not how long people stay on it. It is how quickly they leave it in the right direction, and how few of them leave the site instead.
Which means the design questions worth arguing about are: what are the three or four things people come here for, are they all reachable in one click, and does the first screen make clear which of them exist at all.
That last one is where a lot of sites fail without knowing it. Across 54 Singapore B2B sites we reviewed in August 2026, 19 published no project record, portfolio or case studies of any kind. Every one of those companies has done the work. A visitor who arrives wanting to check whether you have handled a job like theirs finds nothing to route to, gives up, and goes back to the search results where three competitors are waiting.
The first screen is the whole argument
Two patterns from the same review are worth sitting with.
One crane rental business had a single page that loaded reliably, and that page opened on a fleet description dated 15 December 2009: a fleet of 88 cranes and 213 aerial lifts, stated as current. 17 years old, on the one page doing the selling. Nobody chose that. It happened because the homepage was treated as a fixed artefact, a cover, rather than as the part of the business that changes most often.
One fabricator had a homepage where the navigation was decorative: SERVICES, ABOUT US, PROJECTS and CONTACT all pointed back at the homepage itself, and only CERTIFICATION and QUALITY CONTROL led anywhere. The footer read 2013, 13 years stale. The site was not routing visitors anywhere, it was circling them, and the CLIENTS heading had nothing behind it at all.
Neither of these is a design problem. Both are the consequence of thinking about a homepage as something you produce once and then admire.
What belongs on it instead
Put the answer to the visitor’s question in the space where the mission statement currently sits.
For most industrial and technical businesses, that means capability stated specifically enough to be matched against a real job, the evidence that you have done it before, and a route to a person who can confirm it. Towa Marine, who repair and install marine air-conditioning, ventilation, refrigeration and cold room systems across Singapore, Port Klang and Tanjong Uncang, open on availability and reach: the commitment to respond within 24 hours and the three-yard footprint sit at the top, with the system-by-system capability list and a direct line immediately beneath. The three decades of experience still appear. They sit lower, where they support the decision rather than delay it.
Everything a company most wants to say about itself tends to be the thing a buyer needs last. That is uncomfortable and it is consistently true.
So the test for a homepage is not whether it looks considered. It is whether a stranger who has never heard of you can work out, inside ten seconds, whether you can help and where to go next. If your current homepage cannot pass that, no amount of art direction will fix it, because the problem is the order of the argument rather than its presentation.
That is also why homepage work is rarely a standalone job. It is where the structure of the whole site becomes visible, which is why we treat page architecture as something to sign off before anything is designed, and why our project bands are set by what the site has to do rather than by how many pages it has.