GOV.UK homepage gets a makeover

The GOV.UK homepage is getting a “bold” new makeover according to the Government Digital Service (GDS) team – its first in almost a decade. 

Despite being used more than a million times each week to access essential government information and services, the GOV.UK homepage has “not been changed significantly since 2014,” the GDS team wrote in a blog post.

“We want to make sure that the homepage is as useful as it can be for all users and that it continues to reflect the innovative spirit of GOV.UK."

A series of updates are officially underway, including a visual refresh, changes to the content and a page re-structure based on user-needs.

Bolder and better  

The design of the homepage will be “bolder and clearer” on mobile devices, with increased font sizes, a simpler layout and less text on the page; removing content that is not being used as much.

This is to ensure mobile accessibility keeps up with user-engagement. For example, a decade ago, only 20% of visits to GOV.UK were made from mobile devices. Today, this number is over 60%, and continues to grow.

Improvements will also be made to the homepage to make it easier to navigate. This includes turning the popular links into a bulleted list and increasing spacing between sections. 

In order to ensure that GOV.UK is as user-friendly as possible, several changes to the structure of the homepage will be carried out. These include: moving the search bar higher up, adding another link to the ‘popular’ section and turning grids into lists because they are easier to scan. 

Such updates are already having a positive impact: "We've already seen an increase in the number of people using search on mobile since it was moved higher up," GDS said.