Why are we making long home pages?

Clients often say "users don’t really land on the home page, google sends them to an internal page", I don't agree with this. Look at the below analytics for top pages from our clients:

 

Wiliam Website:

 

Client A:

 

Client B:

 

Client C:

 

With the exception of a heavily funded campaign landing page the home page is consistently the top visited page for the above 4 high traffic websites. The home page generally has the lowest time on page, this is because people go straight to the area of interest. Let's not forget the purpose of a home page is to get people off a home page.

 

This shows the average time on page for the top 5 pages on the Wiliam site. The Home page is the lowest.

 

Now that we know users ARE going to home page, the question is what are they doing there. The answer can be found by looking at heat tracking technologies such a clicktale. This shows us where the user clicks and what the scroll reach is.

 

This is what I am seeing:

 

Client 1:

 

 

Client 2:

 

Client3:

 

 

As you can see there is nothing much going on below the fold of a home page. Even if you do entice the user to scroll how do they know what they are scrolling for is of interest to them? Users are more likely to scroll on internal pages than the home page as the internal page is generally more relevant.

 

Creating a long home page is only going to increase the initial load time of the site and potentially create a higher bounce rate and for what benefit? Majority of users will never know what is down there anyway.

 

Why not focus your attention on better structured IA so it's easy to navigate to the relevant area of the site than creating lengthy home pages.