What Does a Resource Hub Page Actually Need to Do?

What does a resource hub page actually need to do?

It needs to help someone decide what to read next in about four seconds. That is the whole job. A resource hub is not a place to display everything you have published. It is a routing page, and it succeeds when a visitor leaves it quickly for the right piece.

Most B2B resource hubs fail at this in the same way. They present a wall of identical cards, each with a thumbnail, a category tag, and a truncated title, sorted by date. The visitor cannot tell any of them apart, so they leave the site instead of the page.

We have rebuilt enough of these to have a strong opinion, so this is an opinion piece rather than a neutral survey. Our position: a resource hub should read like a librarian's recommendation, not a warehouse inventory.

Why do most resource hubs fail?

Because they optimise for completeness instead of choice. The page is built by asking what content exists, then displaying all of it. Nobody asks what decision the visitor is trying to make, which is the only question that produces a useful layout.

The second cause is the card. A grid of cards makes every item look equally important, which means none of them do. Uniformity feels tidy to the person building the page and reads as noise to the person using it.

The third is date sorting. Recency is a meaningful signal for news and almost meaningless for evergreen guides. Sorting by date tells a first time visitor that your best work is whatever you happened to publish last week.

What is information scent, and why does it decide everything here?

Information scent is the user's rough guess about whether a page will answer their question, based on the link label, the surrounding context, and what they already know. Raluca Budiu of Nielsen Norman Group described it in February 2020 as an imperfect estimate that people use to choose where to go next.

It comes from information foraging theory, which treats browsing as a hunt. People follow the strongest scent and abandon a trail that weakens. A hub page is nothing but a set of competing scents, so the design question is which ones you make strong.

Budiu's warning about landing pages applies directly. Pages with very little text and a large image often fail to tell people whether they are on the right track, and instead of scrolling or clicking, visitors leave the site entirely. A beautiful hub with six words on it is a dead end.

Do people read these pages at all?

No, they scan them, and that has been measured for a long time. Jakob Nielsen's 1997 study found that 79 percent of test users always scanned any new page they came across, while only 16 percent read word by word. Nothing since has reversed that.

The same study measured what helped. Against a promotional control version, concise text improved usability by 58%, a scannable layout by 47%, and objective language by 27%. Combining all three improved it by 124%.

Those numbers are nearly thirty years old and we quote them deliberately, because the thing they measure has not changed. What changed is that we now have far more content competing on a single page, which makes scannability more load bearing, not less.

How should the page be organised, if not by date?

By the reader's situation. Group items under headings a visitor would recognise as their own problem, such as choosing a platform, fixing a slow site, or planning a migration. Four or five named groups beat twenty tags, because a tag describes the content and a group describes the reader.

Inside each group, lead with the one piece you would genuinely recommend first, and say why in a sentence. That sentence is the highest value text on the entire page, and it is the one almost nobody writes.

Keep the rest of the group short. A hub that shows five things per group and a link to see everything is more useful than one that shows forty, because the forty destroy the scent of the five.

What belongs on a hub card, and what does not?

A specific title, one line describing what the reader will be able to do afterwards, and the format if formats differ. That is it. Skip the date unless recency genuinely matters. Skip the category tag if the group heading already said it. Skip the thumbnail if the thumbnails are decorative.

We are unpopular on that last one. Stock imagery on hub cards adds weight, adds nothing to the decision, and makes fifteen items look like fifteen of the same thing. If the image does not distinguish the item, it is competing with the title for attention and winning.

The exception is genuinely visual content. A design teardown, a template, a chart heavy report. There the image is the information, and it earns its space.

Should a resource hub have search and filters?

Search yes, filters usually no. Search serves the visitor who already knows what they want, and it is cheap to add. Filters serve a visitor browsing a large, genuinely varied catalogue, and most B2B resource libraries are neither large enough nor varied enough to need them.

A filter bar on a hub with forty items is a confession that you did not organise the page. It moves the work of curation from your team to the reader, and the reader did not volunteer.

If you do add filters, add them because your analytics show people using search for the same three narrowing terms repeatedly. That is evidence. A filter bar added because competitors have one is not.

Why does this matter more now than it did three years ago?

Because fewer visits are arriving in the first place, so each one has to work harder. Pew Research Center tracked 900 United States adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked through to a result in 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared.

Pew also found people ended their browsing session entirely 26% of the time after a page with an AI summary, against 16% without. The visitor who does reach your hub is more deliberate and rarer than they used to be.

That changes the brief. A hub page used to be a net catching passing traffic. Now it is closer to a single conversation with someone who chose to click, and conversations need specifics.

How does the hub connect to the rest of the site?

Through two directions people usually forget. Every article should link back to its group on the hub, not just to the hub generally, so a reader who finishes one piece lands somewhere useful. And the hub should link out to your commercial pages where a group genuinely implies a service.

That second one is not a conversion trick. If someone has read three pieces on site performance, a link to how you work on performance is the most relevant thing on the page, and hiding it is a strange kind of politeness.

The mechanics of that navigation layer matter too, and we covered them in how to design website navigation people actually use.

What does a good hub look like when it is finished?

Boring, in the best sense. A short intro that says who the library is for. Four or five named groups. A recommended first read in each with one honest sentence about it. A search box. No hero image doing nothing, no infinite scroll, no filter bar nobody asked for.

It should be obvious within one screen what kind of company publishes this and what problems it handles. If a visitor cannot answer that after scanning, the page is decoration.

Everything here rests on writing for scanning rather than reading, which we treat as a core design skill rather than a copy task, and covered in designing for people who skim.

Where would we start if this page already exists?

Open your analytics and find what people click from the hub today. Usually it is three or four items and a long tail of nothing. Those three or four are your real groups. Build the page around them and let the rest live one level down.

Then write the recommendation sentences by hand. Not generated, not the meta description, not the first line of the article. A sentence a person would say out loud if asked which one to read. It takes an afternoon and it is the difference between a library and a pile.

We rebuild these as part of most site projects, usually because the hub is the page the client stopped believing in. If yours has quietly become a wall of cards, we are happy to look at it and say what we would cut. You can find us at phoenix.studio, and the visual side of that cutting is covered in how visual hierarchy actually works.