Redirecting only homepage to new page. problems?

[TomSnow]

My UX guy is tasked with redesigning the homepage of one of our less successful sites.

We don't have the resources to build it out at the moment, so he wants to redirect our homepage (and just our homepage) to an Unbounce page (for those who don't know, Unbounce is a landing page builder that makes it really easy).

Does this sound like a huge mistake?

Any potential risks? Best practice?

Thanks!

[dennisjensen]

I wouldn't do it. Would look suspicious to the user and an odd signal to send to search engines. Could you possibly, (I'm not familiar with the Unbounce system) embed the Unbounce code on your own page?

[lucy24]

our homepage (and just our homepage)

Then you might as well throw out the rest of the site, because nobody will ever get to its pages, except search engines requesting URLs they already know about. What happens to the links that formerly led from interior pages to the front page? Neither google nor humans think highly of internal links that lead only to a redirect.

If you're not in a position to fix the site, either leave it alone or close it down.

[tangor]

? A site that's working (just not what you want) replaced with something that will break it?

Let the site run as is until the redesign can be addressed.