First, the percentage of visitors coming to major brand sites through "side doors" is growing but is still a small part of the overall traffic for most of our large customers. The homepage is still king for branded sites. For unbranded sites, it never was.
In any case, homepages remain important, even it we think of them as "home bases" rather than "front doors." As home base, the homepage is the place to go to most easily re-orient yourself before branching off. The goal is to provide a "grounding" experience and make it easy to find a product, article or other place on the site.
In the olden days, sites were like grand manor houses where you entered through an ornate front door. Nearly everyone came through the front door, and the process through the site could be managed. Now a site might be more like an apartment building. Each major section might have its own homepage, campaigns have their own homepage and, with personalization, groups of users get their own homepage.
The question is if a page has to function in two modes -- inside page and hybrid inside/homepage -- what content needs to be included? And, should one page serve both functions, or should the page show different content under the different conditions?
I would recommend the following:
- Find out which of your pages act as an entry page for more than 100 visitors a day.
- Look at drop-off rates and conversions for this traffic.
- Look at your homepage and your entry pages that have low drop-off rates versus those that have high drop-offs.
- Identify content that is left out or included in each case and test versions of the poor performing pages that better match the high performers.
- Ask, "Who enters these pages and what are they seeing or not seeing that makes them leave?"
- Develop new versions that address these issues and test against the current one.