I’ve visited many websites that have “splash” or entry pages that come in many flavors: watching some animation, viewing a slideshow, or just a static graphic image. All of them prevent you from directly going to someone’s home page, and usually provide a link to “Skip Intro” to get to the home page in the event you don’t want to see the splash show. There are many articles out there written on whether splash or entry pages are a good idea or a bad idea, and I’d like to share with you an experiment one of my client’s ran recently to find out the answer.

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One of my clients who recently launched his website was watching his traffic and wanted to do something to try and get contact information from his visitors so that if they didn’t buy his product, he could at least follow up with them.

So we tried an experiment. I created an entry page that asked for a name and an email address to receive a free newsletter. I also had a “Skip” button that led them to the site’s main homepage. This configuration was left on the website for three days, and the resulting data was obtained using (my favorite) Web-Stat website traffic tracking tool. The tool allows you to see the click-path of visitors, so we could clearly see whether someone went from the entry page to the main home page, or whether they left at the entry page.

Here’s the data that was collected over a three day period:

• 17 visitors went from entry/registration page to main home page
• 5 visitors left the website from entry/registration page without ever visiting the website

So 5/22 visitors, 23% left the website prematurely because of the entry/registration page, even though all they had to do to enter the page was choose “skip”. Sometimes asking folks for one extra click can be one click too many!

Now, what we don’t know, is if this experiment was run for a longer amount of time, if revenue made from pursuing potential customers who had registered would have offset the 23% decrease in traffic. But if all your entry page is doing is preventing people from getting to your home page, then I don’t see why anyone would use a entry page at all.

On an interesting note, this 23% entry page traffic loss matches the 25% number quotes in this article on “How To Convince Clients They Don’t Need A Splash Page” which is pretty amazing. It suggests that you will lose a significant portion of website traffic if you use a splash page or entry page or some other kind of page that prevents visitors from directly going to your home page. Since it was the only article I read that stated a particular percentage, I was happy when my client wanted to run an experiment to get our own data.

So that’s the end of the story. Splash pages and entry pages and any other kind of page that prevents visitors from going directly to your home page have the potential to drive away a quarter of your website traffic. I try hard to talk all of my clients out of them, and now I have real data!

Just say no to splash pages 🙂

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill