What Goes in the Section Right After Your Hero?

What goes in the section right after your hero?

The thing that makes your hero believable. A hero makes a claim, and the section underneath it either earns that claim or wastes the only guaranteed scroll you get. Most sites put a feature grid there. What usually belongs there is proof, or the problem stated in the reader's own words.

I have spent more time arguing about heroes than any other part of a page, and the second section barely comes up. It gets filled in last, usually with whatever the team has lying around. That is strange, because it is the section that decides whether the hero was true.

The way I think about it is that the hero is a promise and the second section is the evidence. Promise without evidence reads as marketing. Evidence without a promise reads as noise. You need both, in that order, within the first two screens.

Why does the second section get treated as an afterthought?

Because attention in the design process is spent where attention in the review process lands. Everybody looks at the hero, everybody has an opinion on the headline, and by the time the conversation reaches the next section people are tired. So it gets the leftovers: three icons, three short paragraphs, and a heading nobody argued about.

There is a structural reason too. The hero has an obvious job, which is to say what this is. The second section has no obvious job, so it becomes a dumping ground for everything that did not fit elsewhere. Features, logos, a video, a bit of company history, sometimes all four stacked.

The result is a page that starts strongly and immediately loses its thread. A visitor who was interested by the headline arrives at a grid of features they have no context for, and the page has changed from a conversation into a brochure in one scroll.

What does the eyetracking data say about that space?

That it is expensive real estate. Nielsen Norman Group's eyetracking research found users spent about 57 percent of their page-viewing time above the fold, and that 74 percent of the viewing time was spent in the first two screenfuls. Whatever sits in your second screen is getting a serious share of the attention your page will ever receive.

The same research reports that 81 percent of the viewing time is spent in the first three screenfuls of information, and that within the top of the page, more than 42 percent of viewing time fell within the top 20 percent of the page and more than 65 percent within the top 40 percent. Those figures come from over 130,000 eye fixations on a 1920 by 1080 screen, from 120 participants.

Read that as a budget rather than as a rule. If roughly three quarters of the looking happens in your first two screens, then the hero and the section under it are carrying most of the persuasion, and everything below is reinforcement for people who are already interested. Designing the page in that order is more honest than designing it top to bottom and hoping.

What I would not do is conclude that nothing below matters. The research says attention drops, not that it disappears, and a long page still does work for the people who scroll. I wrote separately about what happens further down in the piece on how far down a long page attention goes.

What job should the second section do?

Close the gap between the claim and the reader's scepticism. Ask what a sceptical version of your buyer thinks immediately after reading your headline, and answer that. Sometimes the answer is proof, sometimes it is a definition, sometimes it is who this is for. It is almost never a feature list.

The test I use is to read the hero out loud, then say the word "really" as a question. If the hero says you cut onboarding time in half, the reader is thinking really. Then the second section is proof: a named customer, a number, a demonstration. If the hero says something the reader does not yet understand, the reader is thinking what does that actually mean, and the second section is a plain explanation.

Getting this right means the second section is not reusable across pages. It depends entirely on what the hero claimed and who is reading it. That is inconvenient for teams who want a component library of sections, and it is why so many second sections are generic.

Should it be social proof?

Often, but only if the proof is specific. A row of logos directly under a bold claim is the most common choice and one of the weakest, because logos prove that companies bought, not that the claim is true. A single named quote that addresses the exact promise in the hero does more work than twelve grey logos.

The version I like is one customer, one sentence, one specific outcome, with a real name and company attached. It answers the really question directly. It also reads as a human voice arriving immediately after your marketing voice, which is a pleasant change of texture on the page.

If your proof is weak, say less rather than dressing it up. An unconvincing testimonial is worse than none, because it signals that this is the best you have. I went through what makes proof believable in the article on believable testimonial sections, and the same standard applies at double strength this high up the page.

What if the visitor does not know they have a problem?

Then the second section states the problem, not the proof. Proof only persuades somebody who already wants the outcome. If your buyer has not yet named the thing that is wrong, showing them a happy customer is premature. Describe the situation they are in, accurately enough that they recognise themselves.

This is where the best second sections I have seen live. They describe the reader's current workaround with uncomfortable precision, the spreadsheet that four people edit, the report somebody rebuilds every Monday, the handover that always drops something. The reader thinks that is exactly my week, and now the hero's claim has a reason to exist.

The mistake is doing this for too long. One paragraph of problem is recognition. Three paragraphs of problem is lecturing somebody about their own job, and it reads as condescending. State it, let them recognise it, move on.

How long should the section be?

Short. One idea, expressed once. This section exists to hold the reader's momentum, not to be comprehensive, and momentum is fragile in the second screen. If it takes more than a few sentences plus one piece of supporting material, you are trying to do two jobs in one section.

When a second section grows, it is usually because two people wanted different things there. One wanted proof, one wanted an explanation, and the compromise was to include both. The right resolution is to pick one for this section and give the other its own section below, rather than to interleave them.

Visually, I want this section to look lighter than the hero, not heavier. If it competes with the hero for weight, the page has two beginnings and the reader has to work out which one to read first. A quiet, confident second section makes the hero look more certain, not less.

What does this look like on a services page versus a product page?

A product page usually needs a demonstration, because the buyer can imagine using the thing. A services page usually needs the problem stated and an indication of who you work with, because the buyer is not evaluating software, they are deciding whether you understand their situation.

That difference gets missed constantly, because services pages tend to get built by copying the structure of product pages. A grid of three service offerings in the second section is the equivalent of a feature grid, and it lands exactly as flatly. The buyer is not choosing between your three services yet, they are deciding whether you are worth a conversation.

I set out the wider version of this argument in the piece on what a services page needs that a homepage does not. The second section is where the two page types diverge earliest, and where copying the wrong template costs you most.

How do you test whether it is working?

Show the hero and second section alone to somebody outside the company and ask two questions: what does this company do, and would you keep reading. You do not need a test platform for this. You need five honest people and a screenshot cropped at the end of the second section.

The answers are usually diagnostic in a way analytics is not. If people can describe what you do but say they would not keep reading, your proof is weak. If they would keep reading but cannot describe what you do, your hero is vague and the second section is covering for it. Those are different problems with different fixes.

Scroll depth data is worth a glance afterwards, but treat it carefully. A drop after the second section can mean the section failed, or it can mean the section answered the question and the visitor went to your pricing page. Look at where they went, not only at whether they stopped.

What should you do next?

Open your homepage, screenshot the first two screens, and cover the hero. Ask whether the remaining section earns the claim you just hid. If it is a feature grid, you have the most common version of this problem, and replacing it with one specific piece of proof is an hour of work.

Then do the same on your most important non-homepage page, because that is where the copied template usually shows. Homepages get attention. Services and product pages inherit whatever the homepage did two years ago.

If you have a hero you are happy with and a page that still does not convert, reach out. In my experience the fault is very often one screen lower than everybody is looking, and it is a cheaper fix than another round of headline testing.