The 30-second homepage video: what to say and what to cut

If your homepage video runs longer than thirty seconds, the back half is playing for an empty room.

Your homepage video gets one job: answer "what do you do and why should I care" before the visitor's thumb moves. I tell every client the same thing. Thirty seconds, max.

Open with the single best line of the business. Not the tagline, the line. "We fix commercial HVAC in forty-eight hours" beats thirty seconds of a skyline and a smiling receptionist. Cut the drone shot at the open. I shoot drones for a living and I still cut it here. It eats the four seconds where the visitor decides to stay.

What goes in the cut: the founder reading the mission statement, the team gathered around a laptop, the logo animation that takes six seconds to finish. None of it answers a question. All of it costs attention you do not have.

What stays: the result. One number if you have one. "We cut their energy bill forty percent" is a homepage video. Your face, your voice, your actual work, in the first five seconds.

The analytics back me up. On the sites I track, completion rates fall off a cliff past forty-five seconds, and the drop starts around second ten. Every second past thirty is for you, not the visitor.

Make the long version for YouTube if you want. The homepage gets thirty seconds. The visitors who want more will call.