For decades, the homepage was the front door. Brands obsessed over above-the-fold messaging, hero images, and the perfect navigation hierarchy. The assumption was simple: visitors would arrive at your domain, take in your carefully orchestrated first impression, and navigate their way deeper.

That assumption is now largely fiction.

Where people actually land

The data tells a different story. Depending on the industry, somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of website traffic now enters through pages other than the homepage. People arrive from Google searches that land them on blog posts. They tap links in social feeds that drop them into product pages. They click through from newsletters, Slack shares, and increasingly, ai-generated summaries that link directly to specific content.

Your homepage might be the page you spend the most time designing, but it’s often not the page most people see first.

The rise of the distributed entrance

This shift has been gradual, but three forces have accelerated it dramatically.

First, search engines got better at deep indexing. Google doesn’t just know your homepage exists—it knows about every indexed page, and it’s increasingly likely to serve a subpage that directly answers someone’s query.

Second, social sharing changed discovery patterns. When someone shares your content, they’re sharing a specific URL, not your homepage. The shareable unit of the web is the page, not the site.

Third, AI assistants are becoming primary discovery mechanisms. When someone asks claude or chatgpt a question and gets a response with citations, those links point to specific content, not homepages. These assistants are trained to find and surface the most relevant information, which almost by definition means bypassing general landing pages.

What this means for information architecture

If any page might be someone’s first impression, every page needs to function as an entrance. This doesn’t mean cramming navigation and brand messaging onto every template. It means rethinking what a page needs to do.

A page that serves as an entrance needs to accomplish three things quickly: establish who you are, explain what this specific content is about, and provide clear paths forward. The first can often be handled with minimal branding—a logo, a consistent visual language, maybe a simple tagline. The second is the content itself. The third is where most sites fail.

Too many content pages treat navigation as an afterthought. They assume visitors already understand the site structure, that they’ve built a mental model from the homepage. But someone landing on your product comparison blog post from a Google search has no such model. They need clear, contextual paths: related content, logical next steps, ways to understand where this piece fits in your broader offering.

The homepage isn’t dead, but its role has changed

None of this means you should abandon your homepage. It still matters—just differently than before. The homepage increasingly serves people who already know you: returning visitors, investors checking you out after a meeting, candidates researching your company before an interview. These are intentional visitors, people who typed your domain or clicked your brand name.

For this audience, the homepage is less about first impressions and more about orientation. What’s new? What are you focused on now? How has the company evolved since they last checked in? The homepage becomes a status update, a signpost for the initiated.

Designing for the reality of distributed entry

So what changes in practice?

Templates need to work harder. Each page template should include enough context for a first-time visitor to orient themselves. This might mean more prominent breadcrumbs, clearer section labels, or contextual sidebars that explain how this page relates to your broader offering.

Navigation needs to be smarter. Instead of one-size-fits-all navigation, consider contextual navigation that adapts based on the content. Someone reading a case study about e-commerce might see different suggested paths than someone reading a case study about healthcare.

Content needs entry-point awareness. When you write a blog post or create a landing page, ask yourself: if this were someone’s first interaction with us, would they understand who we are and what we do? You don’t need lengthy introductions, but you need enough orientation that the content makes sense in isolation.

Brand consistency becomes even more important. When people enter through scattered doors, visual and tonal consistency is what creates cohesion. Your brand system needs to be strong enough that someone landing on any page immediately recognizes they’re in your world.

The deeper question

The end of homepage primacy is really about control. For years, brands could choreograph the visitor journey—guide people through a carefully designed funnel from homepage to product page to contact form. That control has eroded. People now enter where they enter, guided by algorithms and assistants and social sharing patterns that are largely outside your influence.

The response isn’t to fight this reality but to embrace it. Design every page like it might be the first page someone sees, because increasingly, it will be.