The brief
The brief behind this rewrite: a homepage headline for an invoicing tool built for UK sole traders and freelancers, people who already use an accounting app but still spend an evening a week chasing clients for payment by email. The headline sits above the fold, the part of the page a visitor sees before they scroll, so it has to earn the next click on its own. Nobody reads a homepage top to bottom the way they read an article. They read the headline, decide in a few seconds whether the page is talking to them, and either stay or leave.
The original headline
The version that arrived for review read: "Powerful software built to help your business grow." It is grammatical, it is polite, and it fails the one test a homepage headline has to pass. Swap it onto a CRM, a gym franchise, an insurance broker or a project management tool, and it still reads as if it belongs there. A headline that survives being moved to a different industry unchanged was never written for this one.
The rewrite
The rewritten version: "Invoice a UK client in under two minutes, and let automatic reminders chase the late ones." It names the reader's actual task, gives a specific figure, and states the outcome the reader is actually after. It could not be moved to a gym franchise without rewriting every word in it, which is the point of a homepage headline that is doing its job.
What changed, and why
- "Powerful" is gone. It is a claim about quality with no evidence attached, and a reader has no way to check it, so it sits on the page doing nothing except taking up the first word.
- "software" became "Invoice". The original named the category of product; the rewrite names the action the reader takes. A visitor scanning a homepage is looking for what they can do here.
- "a UK client" was added. It tells a freelancer this tool understands UK invoicing, and it does that in three words.
- "in under two minutes" replaced nothing, because the original made no equivalent claim at all. A specific figure gives the reader something to weigh; a headline with no number in it is asking to be taken on trust.
- "help your business grow" became "let automatic reminders chase the late ones". Growth is an ambition nobody can picture; chasing a late invoice is a Tuesday afternoon the reader has actually had. This is the difference between a feature and a benefit: the reminder function is the feature, and not having to send the email yourself is the benefit.
The principle
Read the original headline back and ask whether a competitor's homepage could carry it unchanged. If the answer is yes, the headline is describing the category, and it is spending the one sentence a visitor reads before deciding to leave on saying nothing they could not have guessed. A homepage headline that names the reader's actual task, states a specific outcome, and could only sit above this one product is doing the job the space was built for. The full mechanics of building a homepage around that opening line, including how the rest of the page carries on from it, are set out in the guide to writing a homepage.