What do you notice about the homepages of the fastest growing companies in the world?

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

• No access without signup. Most startups make the mistake of giving people who visit their site free access to content, whether it’s apartment booking or daily deals. This is often a bad idea. Contrary to popular belief, the more things a visitor can interact with on your site before they’re prompted to sign up, the lower your signup rate will be.
• Navigation and hyperlinks are almost always absent. Over the years internet marketers have developed what they call the “Squeeze Page” with minimal content and a single clear call-to-action because they discovered that additional information could distract a visitor or cause them to click away to a different website. Notice that there’s nothing below the fold on any of these sites.
• Focus on a single, clear value proposition. In almost every case, the product’s value proposition is boiled down to one clear statement: “Your best source for knowledge” or “Be great at what you do”. People almost never read more than one sentence on your site (and they won’t even read that one unless it’s big enough and strategically placed), so there’s no point in trying to figure out your top 3 “bulletpoints”. This also makes it much, much easier to test as a growth hacker. Just replace one sentence with another until it works.
• Your product is not about sharing. I see this mistake all the time. Lots of startups start out thinking that people will use their product because it helps them “share” things more easily. Let me be clear here: most people do not share. And even those people who share things aren’t sharing things 90% of the time. Most of the time on the web is spend consuming, not producing. More than 50% of Twitter users almost never tweet. This is why Twitter has shifted their messaging from “the easiest way to share with your friends’ to “Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about”. If you cater only to proactive people, you’ll be alienating most of your potential users.
• Big images. Big images increase conversion rates. Just do it.
• Embedded signup forms. Start your signup process on the homepage so people don’t have to click through to a new page for no reason. Generally speaking, the more clicks you have in your signup process, the more people will drop off along the way. Note that these signup forms are almost always on the right-hand side, above the fold. They also rarely ask for more than a name, email and password.

When I tell people these things they often complain: “But everyone knows Twitter and Facebook, so they don’t have to explain what their product is about. No one has ever heard of [my startup] so I actually need to explain it to people.”

You are wrong.

Maybe you and I already know what Twitter and Facebook are about, but we’re not the people they’re trying to get to sign up on their homepage. 2.4 billion people use the internet and more using it each day. Believe it or not, there are still people on earth who haven’t heard of Twitter or Facebook. Those are the people these homepages are trying to convert – not the luddites who refuse to sign up (trust me, Twitter and Facebook stopped caring about them long ago).

The same is true for your startup. Don’t be stubborn and don’t think that for some reason your startup is an exception. Making that kind of assumption because you’re scared to try something counter-intuitive is a sure way to make sure you never do anything innovative.

Read also: Top Productivity Tools to Optimize Your Business

The highest ROI way to increase signups: Make a minimal homepage – Click To Tweet

The post originally appeared on Grow Hack.