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Why is your library’s homepage important? Well, for many of your patrons, it’s their first point of entry into your library’s digital and, potentially, overall experience. Just like someone who’d walk through the doors of your physical branches, you want to help your online patrons find what they’re looking for, sign up for your great programs and events, and build a personal bond with their public library.
Think about the time, attention, and investment you put into the front of your physical branches. You want to “wow” your patrons and engage them from the very first second. Your homepage is no different; it’s the ‘front door’ to your website, and your website is another branch of your library.
That’s right! Our Partner Libraries showed us that successful library homepages can take many — and very different — forms, but they’re all built on the fact that those libraries treat their online patrons as well as they do their in-person ones. They think about their online users’ demographics, habits, goals, interests, preferences, and other attributes to cultivate a homepage they’ll enjoy.
We’ve seen great homepages that offer a little bit of everything for everyone, while others focus on the library power user (by focusing on the collection, promoting new releases, etc.). The approach you take will start with the users you want to focus on and engage and develop from there. So, let’s dive in and unpack what it takes to build a great library website homepage!
Screenshot of Arapahoe Libraries' website homepage. Learn more about how they're leveraging their digital tools to engage their patrons.
Get a deeper look at how to build your library's website homepage!
Step 1: Start with Metrics and Patron Input
You won’t necessarily build the optimal homepage on the first go. It’s an iterative process that requires continual monitoring and testing, which leads to optimization. You need to identify the appropriate metrics to measure progress and determine success.
As a starting point, you can extract many valuable insights from Google Analytics 4 (GA4), such as:
- Users: Is your content driving more traffic? Are you seeing a traffic increase from key channels (like email, social media, search engines, etc)?
- Sessions: Are the people visiting your website exploring more pages? What can you do to increase the number of pages each user is visiting?
- Engagement Rate: GA4 introduced this metric to unpack how your visitors are interacting with your content. It'll consider a session "engaged" if the user was on the page for longer than seconds, led to one or more conversion events, and resulted in two or more page views. This is a valuable metric for libraries as it helps uncover if online patrons are exploring the website and finding what they need.
- Average Engagement Time: This is the average time your homepage has your user's focus and attention. It helps you examine the technical aspects of your homepage, such as loading speed, errors, and user experience.
- Event Count: These are the number of times your users triggered an 'event,' such as scrolling past a certain point on the page, or clicking on a specific component, like an email newsletter subscription box. It's a good tool for tracking engagement on specific campaigns or parts of your homepage. For example, you can use events to see if users are finding and using your catalog carousel.
- Device Types: You can also see how many of your users are browsing your homepage on mobile compared to desktop.
These are the metrics you can start delving into by using GA4 out of the box. However, with additional customization, you can dive deeper into the impact of your content, like what types of content are performing well, when they are performing well, and so on.
As a library, you may also want to see the interaction between your website and online catalog, but this will require richer toolsets and configuration work.
Learn how to fill your homepage with content your patrons will love!
If you’ve configured Google Analytics (GA) with your website and online catalog, you’ll get each of these metrics (libraries using BiblioWeb and BiblioCore leverage GA integration out of the box).
In addition to GA metrics, it’s also a good idea to collect feedback from your patrons, especially your web users. They’ll give you insights about what they’re looking for, what interests them, and if the homepage is delivering on their expectations.
Once you’ve flagged the metrics you want to measure, take a look at how your homepage is performing today. See what people are clicking on, how long they’re spending on the homepage, whether they're clicking on your target elements (like CTAs, etc.), and if they’re leaving the website without converting on an action (like signing up for an email list, checking out a promotion, etc.).
Brandi, the Assistant Director at Kenosha Public Library, studied the content of her original homepage. It had originally featured a blog on voting, but the metrics revealed that only one or two people clicked on the blog through a whole two-month campaign.
Brandi used the data to gauge what content was gaining traction and, in turn, utilized patron feedback to ideate a new content direction. For example, Brandi placed collections and resources at the center of the new homepage and reworked the wider UX to invite patron exploration.
Step 2: Set Your Goals
Next, identify the goals of your homepage. At a high level, think about how you want to establish your library’s role in the community. What’s your story? How do you want people to see their local library; for example, are you a home for learning, a place for people to forge social connections, or maybe a safe and welcoming environment for youth to grow?
From there, start thinking more 'tactically' by understanding how you want your library's web presence to grow. Think of the specific, actionable steps you can take to drive more traffic to certain parts of your collections, or your library's resources (like makerspaces).
Our Partner Libraries employ a wide range of tactical goals, such as:
- Increasing web traffic to the homepage
- Reviewing data to understand which content does best (for example, do blogs outperform online resources on the homepage?)
- Understanding how to optimize content so that it performs better (for example, placing a content piece on a different page)
- Conducting testing on graphics (for example, to see if users prefer photographs versus illustrations)
- Evaluating where content is on the homepage and if it performs better or worse depending on its placement (for example, testing where catalog carousels perform best)
Since the homepage often captures the greatest number of users and their attention, you'll want to ensure that it serves as a gateway to discovery. You should take steps to ensure your users have pathways to find additional content.
For example, a user might not be interested in fantasy novels, but they may like the horror recommendations as they scroll through a carousel of staff picks. Likewise, someone who wants to book a meeting room may need to get a library card first, so placing a link for the registration process is vital. It creates a bridge for them to start using your library.
As part of building your library’s brand presence, you should also develop a brand guide to help direct your content creation. Provide guidance on your library’s brand colors, voice, tone, typography, unique-to-you terminology, and other attributes.
Screenshot of Lawrence Public Library's homepage. Learn how they're using their website to enrich the library experience for their online patrons.
Step 3: Build Your Content Strategy
‘Content’ is pretty much anything that goes into your website, be it blogs, staff picks, videos, graphic design elements, text, photos, documents, upcoming events, and so on. You’ll want to ensure that the content you’re getting aligns with your needs and resonates with your target users.
There are a few processes you can adopt to manage content creation, such as:
Being Proactive, Not Reactive
Content is a dynamic asset. What works today may not work in a few months or a year. So, keep a close eye on your homepage metrics to see how user behavior is trending. Schedule regular page or asset reviews and continuously collect and leverage patron feedback.
Continually assess the content you already have: Are your assets performing as intended? Can you use the top-performing content to identify best practices for future assets?
Maintaining a Balance
Balance fresh, trendy content without losing sight of evergreen, library-centric content. For example, promoting upcoming events (like an author meet-and-greet) is great, but you should also ensure your homepage helps users find key items of interest, like signing up for a library card, exploring and placing a hold from your collections, booking a study room or other facility, and so on.
Thinking Holistically
Ultimately, you can’t put everything on the homepage, but that doesn’t mean those other assets can’t be discoverable or usable. This is where investing in your navigation is key. When configured correctly, a great navigation experience through well-organized menus and other elements offers great pathways for exploration and discovery. It can play a key role in delivering a high-quality digital library experience.
You should also think about how your homepage looks and works on mobile. We're in an age where easily more than half of the world's web traffic happens on mobile. Therefore, you need to build a powerful and user-friendly mobile experience to engage a huge chunk of your online patrons.
Guiding the Wider Team
In addition, create editor checklists that make reviewing content submissions an easy and transparent process. Set a clear and measurable baseline of what you’re looking for (like necessary elements, titles, subtitles, bullet points, internal links to other content, CTAs, reading lists, buttons for placing holds on specific items, etc.).
For example, the team at Lawrence Public Library leverages a combination of processes and tools to empower librarians to create pages. The processes serve as guardrails that ensure that staff-created content meets certain criteria. However, the tools, which include pre-built templates and other rich features, help anyone on the team quickly build content, even if they don't have web development or graphic design skills.
BiblioWeb offers a ready-made public library website platform and rich tools designed drive patron engagement.
Results
Using these steps, Kenosha Public Library and the Fulton County Library System elevated their homepages from static assets to patron-first experiences.
Source: Kenosha Public Library
For example, Kenosha Public Library learned that its online visitors were 'superusers' or people who came to the website with clear objectives, such as getting a library card, or finding specific items or programs at the library. They added a specific section on their menu called 'myKPL' which set up clear pathways for getting (or updating) a library card and immediately accessing the physical and digital catalog and events calendar.
Source: Fulton County Library System
Both libraries also put their respective catalogs at the center of their homepages. Instead of treating their websites as static informational boards, they transformed their websites into virtual library branches where people can explore the catalog. In turn, both Kenosha Public Library and Fulton County Library System added entry points to their catalogs so that the exploration and discovery can start right away and without any friction.
Source: Kenosha Public Library
By leaning into how their online patrons used their respective websites, both libraries focused on building pathways to viewing and enrolling in events. However, they did it through data. Kenosha Public Library, for example, learned that its online users were primarily interested in programs for children, so the team put young and early-reader events front and center. This helped drive event enrollment.
Next Steps
Strategy and processes are key ingredients for building an effective library homepage, but they’re not the only ones. The technical underpinnings of your library website also matter. For example, if your vision for your homepage is to empower your patrons to explore and find specific items as they would at one of your physical branches, then you need integration between your website and catalog. Furthermore, that integration needs to materialize in UX elements that make sense and work for your patrons; can you add book lists and item hold buttons to your blogs, for example?
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