A Clearer Homepage & SEO Foundations That Actually Work

The problem

Functory was starting to do a lot, but the homepage still felt like a work in progress.

It didn’t explain the core promise in a simple sentence, it mixed too many ideas above the fold, and it didn’t really guide newcomers to “ok, what do I do next?”.

At the same time, the sitemap work was technically in place but not fully wired: crawlers weren’t consistently getting the right XML entry point in production.

The product was getting better every day, but the first impression (for both humans and robots) wasn’t keeping up.

What shipped

Two concrete pieces that bring the story and the infrastructure closer together:

1. A redesigned homepage

• A cleaner hero that focuses on one clear message: ship Python functions instantly and get paid when they’re used.
• Shorter, sharper copy that explains what Functory is, who it’s for, and why it matters — without drowning people in details.
• A layout that naturally pulls people toward signing up and discovering the catalog, instead of wandering around and bouncing.

2. A sitemap that actually speaks for the product

• Fixed the sitemap.xml routing so the root sitemap and all sub-sitemaps are correctly served in production.
• Ensured that search engines now see the real, structured picture of Functory’s content: ideas, functions, articles, and more.
• Turned the sitemap from a theoretical feature into a reliable SEO foundation that should boost long-term visibility.

Individually these changes are small, but together they make Functory easier to discover and easier to understand.

Why it matters

A platform can have strong tech and still lose people in the first 5 seconds.

The new homepage is an honest attempt to:

• Respect visitors’ time with simple, direct messaging.
• Make the signup step feel natural, not pushy.
• Show that there’s a real product behind the words, not just a vague idea.

On the SEO side, having a correct, live sitemap.xml (and working sub-sitemaps) is one of those quiet wins:

• Search engines can crawl more efficiently.
• Long-tail content has a better chance to be indexed.
• Future GEO work (long-tail articles, structured ideas) now rests on a solid indexing backbone.

It’s not a viral growth hack, but it’s the kind of groundwork that compounds over months.

How we built it

• Reworked the homepage sections around a simple narrative:

What Functory is → Why it’s useful → How to start.

• Trimmed and rewrote copy to stay concrete: less buzzwords, more “here’s what you can actually do”.
• Kept the visual style consistent with the rest of Functory, but gave it more breathing room: better spacing, clearer hierarchy, and a signup path that feels intentional.

On the infrastructure side:

• Hooked the sitemap generation and serving correctly into the backend and deployment flow.
• Verified that /sitemap.xml now exposes the dynamic sitemap index, and that sub-sitemaps are reachable and valid.
• Treated this as a deployment concern, not a one-off script, so it stays reliable as the product evolves.

What’s next

• Watch how the new homepage performs: signups, bounce rate, and how far people explore after landing.
• Keep tightening the copy and layout as feedback comes in — this is a first good iteration, not the final version.
• Build on the fixed sitemap with more SEO and GEO experiments: topic clusters, better internal linking, and long-tail pages that directly point to runnable functions.

Still early, still a tiny team, but each of these small, quiet improvements makes Functory a bit easier to find — and a bit easier to believe in.