You’ve paid for the ads, you’ve written the offer, and you’ve watched the traffic numbers climb, but the sales aren’t following.
It’s one of the most frustrating positions a business owner can be in, because everything looks like it’s working, right up until the point where people actually need to buy something from you. Nine times out of ten, when we dig into it, the problem isn’t the ads at all. It’s the page they land on.
1. The first three seconds
The first thing we check is what happens in the first three seconds, because that’s genuinely all the time you get. If a visitor can’t tell what you do and why it matters to them without scrolling, they’re gone, and they won’t come back to give you a second chance. A clever headline might feel good to write, but a clear one is what keeps someone on the page long enough to read your second sentence.
2. Mobile is where things fall apart
Mobile is the next place things quietly fall apart. Most of your visitors are on their phones, thumb-scrolling through a queue at the shop or half-watching the telly, and if your buttons are too small or your page takes its time loading, they’ll bounce before they’ve even seen your offer properly. A page that looks lovely on your laptop screen at the office means nothing if it’s fiddly on the phone in someone’s pocket.
3. Too much choice
Then there’s the question of choice, or rather, too much of it. A landing page with a navigation menu, three different buttons, and a pop-up offering a newsletter sign-up is asking your visitor to make several decisions when you only need them to make one. Every extra option you give someone is a chance for them to leave without doing the thing you actually wanted, so strip it back to a single, obvious next step.
4. Forms that ask too much, too soon
Forms are where a lot of good campaigns quietly die. If you’re asking for a phone number, job title, and company size before someone’s even decided they like you, you’re asking too much too soon. Start with a name and an email, get the relationship going, and ask for the rest once they’ve had a reason to trust you a bit more.
5. No sign that anyone trusts you yet
The last one is trust, and it’s easy to underestimate how much weight it carries. People are naturally cautious online, especially with a business they’ve never bought from before, so a page with no reviews, no testimonials, and no sign that real people have used you successfully is asking for a leap of faith most visitors won’t take. A couple of honest testimonials do more work than another paragraph about how great your product is.
What a page that works actually includes
None of these fixes require a full rebuild or a big budget, and that’s the encouraging part. Once you know what to look for, building it in is straightforward, so here’s what we’d want to see on your page instead.
- A headline that says what you do, in plain English.
- A layout built for a phone, checked on a phone.
- One clear ‘call-to-action’, repeated, not a menu of them.
- A form that asks for the minimum to get started.
- Proof that real people trust you.
Seeing it in practice
We rebuilt GoSkydive’s website around exactly this thinking, stripping the page back to a single clear next step and building every part of it for someone holding a phone rather than sitting at a desk. If you want to see these fixes applied to a real business rather than just read about them, the GoSkydive case study is worth a look.
Get those five things right, and you’ll have a page doing the job it’s actually there for. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on yours, we’re always happy to have a look.