Your home page can pool as many people as your other pages. As everyone else rambles on optimizing the whole website, you also have to pay attention to the page that will define all other pages - your home page.
The most ranked page of a website is the home page; therefore it's best to optimize it together with other pages. Tweaking it will help draw in more traffic.
Here are some ways of optimizing your home page:
Show only snippets of your articles on your homepage. Showing all full articles can take forever for your home page to load which can stray your visitors away.
They may also be too impatient to want to scroll down your page. Give them a brief and direct preview of your articles and a link that will lead them to a separate page that contains the article.
Try to limit your excerpts to 10 as the maximum. A number more than that can lead your visitors away from your page. The less images you put on your homepage, the better. Images take up all the bandwidth and can slow your page's loading time.
Although pictures grab attention, it's better to keep it to a minimum but you can use really striking ones.
Use very few ads on your homepage. Make it as simple as it is; you can always add them on other pages.
You can put links and banners to your own articles or categories of it instead. This will give the reader better options of browsing through your site. Optimize your images using image optimization tools.
Choose a webhost that's fast and has a good uptime. Also look for those with high speed servers and good customer support.
This is the best investment you will ever have to make so don't mind getting a pricier one. It gives a huge help to your whole website.
Remove unnecessary widgets and badges on the home page. Only the most important ones should remain there.
These widgets take up a real good amount of bandwidth; therefore slow the loading of your page. You seriously have to avoid a very slow loading page or your visitors will stray.
Also avoid or minimize animations on your homepage to facilitate the speed of load time. You should not divert your client's attention. Use labels on your homepage properly. All categories should be labeled well and organized in to these tabs.
Organization of the whole site is imperative especially on your homepage. Do not make them feel lost once they visit your site.