Buffer now has a new homepage

The Buffer app never really had a homepage. You log in, complete the onboarding, and end up in “Publish” – a queue, probably an empty one, with a calendar and lots of buttons.

For an experienced user, this is great! The calendar Is the product for many people. But for someone who signed up four minutes ago, that’s a strange start. We onboarded new users into the “Existing Users” experience and hoped they would figure out the rest.

We just launched Buffer Home to change that. This is the first major change to Buffer’s user experience since our visual redesign in March. I want to share a bit about it and the strategy behind it – why we created a homepage in 2026 and where Buffers UX goes from here.

The activation problem

For a few years, the biggest growth opportunity within our product was retention: keeping people coming back. We invested a lot there (streaks, goals, lifecycle emails, a generally more sophisticated product), and that work paid off to some extent, but we still had a significant activation challenge.

Activation is about helping more people who sign up have an “A-ha!” to reach. Since using Buffer as a social media toolkit, we’ve worked hard to offer more features and a better workflow to make that “a-ha” possible. However, users must first find all of these features.

Our main tool for this for over two years was a welcome checklist. Statistically, increasing activation a bit worked. But it was also rejected more often than acted upon, covered only a small portion of what Buffer could do, and treated everyone the same – a solo creator, an agency, and a developer exploring our API all got the same four first steps.

So Buffer Home’s first task is to replace that checklist with a page that people can engage with and meet them where they are. New users now land on the homepage after onboarding and see a small set of setup cards that reflect what they told us about themselves. (We’re running this as an A/B test with new signups because we’d rather know it helps than assume it will.)

What it does for everyone else

If you’ve been using Buffer for years, you don’t need help connecting a channel. For existing users, Home is a place to see the state of things before you get started: your upcoming posts, comments you haven’t responded to, and a summary of your posting habits. Everything is clickable, so it acts as a starting point rather than a dashboard that you admire and then leave.

The version for existing users is intentionally minimal in version 1. There is a long list of things that affect Home could Surface – deeper insights, team activity, suggested content – ​​and most of it we intentionally left out. We’d rather ship something we think could still be valuable and learn from actual usage than guess the perfect page.

Where we could go from here

We have an ambitious vision and roadmap for Buffer over the next year: we’re overhauling our analytics and insights capabilities, evolving the community, and making Buffer more powerful for social teams. (And that’s not all!)

Home plays a key role in ensuring that each of these developments, and ultimately your most important social marketing tasks, are easy to find and use.

Let’s say you work at a marketing agency and are responsible for writing posts for an editor to review. There is no easy way to easily respond to review feedback. It takes 3 to 4 clicks to see feedback today. I believe Home can and should display these important review comments so you can respond to them with one click.

A page that unblocks rather than adds

The part I find most strategically interesting: Buffer Home introduces almost no new features (yet!). Everything on it (posts, comments, templates, goals) already existed. What has changed is the way you approach these things.

Buffer’s interface has grown a lot over the years, and having each feature behind its own tab means it will only be discovered by people who are looking for it. A homepage represents the opposite: it can reveal the product gradually depending on where you are in your journey, rather than introducing you to fifteen doors and wishing you luck.

If you’re new to Buffer, you may already see Home. If you’ve been around for a while, it’s coming soon! I would love to hear what you would expect from this. Check out our public roadmap for this feature or contact me on LinkedIn.