A landing page is a page with one job. Not a menu, not an about section, one action you want the visitor to take. Most pages that don't convert are trying to do five things at once, and the visitor, unsure what you want, does nothing. Here's how to build one that gives them a clear yes.
A landing page converts when it makes one promise to one kind of person and asks for one action. The headline mirrors what the visitor already wants, the page shows enough proof to believe you, and everything that isn't the action is removed. Most low conversion comes from too many choices, not weak design.
Who this is for: Anyone sending traffic to a page to get leads.
Your homepage is a lobby. It has doors to everything, about, services, blog, contact, and that's fine, because a lobby is where people orient themselves. A landing page is the opposite. It's a room with one door, and the whole page exists to get the right person through it. That door might be leaving an email, booking a call or buying. One page, one job.
The reason this matters is choice. Every extra link, every you-might-also-like, every menu across the top is another decision you're asking a stranger to make. People asked to make lots of small decisions tend to make the easiest one, which is to leave. When you strip the page back to a single action, you're not dumbing it down, you're doing the visitor a favour by making the next step obvious.
It sounds almost too simple to be worth saying, but the most common reason a page underperforms isn't the copy or the colours, it's that the visitor genuinely can't tell what they're meant to do. They arrive, glance around, see four possible things, and their attention quietly files it under later. A page that asks for one thing removes that hesitation before it starts.
So before anything else, decide the one thing you want this page to achieve, and be honest that it's one thing. If you catch yourself saying I also want them to read the blog and follow me, you're building a lobby, not a landing page.
Most visitors read your headline and almost nothing else before deciding whether to stay. So it carries more weight than the rest of the page put together, and it has one job of its own: to make the visitor feel you're talking about the exact thing on their mind.
The trick is to use their words, not yours. If someone's problem is my emails go to spam, a headline that says optimise your sending infrastructure will lose them, even though it's technically the same thing. Fix the emails that keep landing in spam lands, because it's the sentence already in their head. I keep a note of the phrases clients use on calls, and those phrases usually make better headlines than anything I'd invent.
There's a second part people miss. The headline has to match wherever the visitor just came from. If your ad said free landing page checklist and the page headline talks about your agency, the visitor feels a small jolt of wrong place and leaves. Match the promise. The page should read like the next sentence after the thing that got them to click.
It's also the cheapest thing to test. You can leave the entire page untouched and just try a different first line for a fortnight, and often that single change moves the number more than a full redesign would. So if you only have time to improve one thing on a page, improve the headline. It's carrying the most weight and it's the fastest to change.
Once the headline holds them, a handful of things do the real work. In rough order of how much they matter:
Notice what isn't on that list. Fancy design, animations, a clever colour scheme. Those can help a page feel trustworthy, but they rarely rescue a page whose promise is unclear or whose form asks for too much. If the action is leaving an email for a freebie, the whole thing lives or dies on the follow-up too, which I cover in the lead magnet funnel.
Proof is worth a closer look, because it's where most pages are weakest. The instinct is to reach for praise, lovely to work with, highly recommended, and that kind of thing does almost nothing, because everyone says it and nobody quite believes it. What a wary visitor is really looking for is evidence that you've handled their exact situation before. So make it specific: a named person with a real result, a before and after with actual numbers, a short quote that mentions the precise problem the reader has. If you don't yet have big results to point to, borrow trust in smaller ways, how many people you've helped, a screenshot of a genuine message, a logo of somewhere you've been featured. Honest and modest beats impressive and vague every time, and it's a lot easier to defend when someone asks whether it's true.
The most common killer is the one we've covered, too many choices, so I won't repeat it. The next is slow loading. A page that takes five seconds to appear loses a chunk of visitors before they've read a word, and on phones this is worse than most people realise. Test your page on a normal phone on mobile data, not on your fast office wifi.
After that it's mismatched expectations, where the ad or post promised one thing and the page delivers another. Then there's asking for the big commitment too early, a book-a-call button shown to someone who arrived thirty seconds ago and doesn't yet know why they'd want to. And the quiet one: no reason to act now, so the visitor thinks maybe later, and later never comes.
There's one more that hides in plain sight, which is writing for yourself instead of the reader. Pages that open with we are a boutique studio founded in, followed by three paragraphs about your philosophy, lose people who arrived with a problem and wanted to know quickly whether you can solve it. Lead with their situation, and save the story about you for once they care.
None of these are design problems, they're clarity problems. Which is good news, because clarity is free to fix.
Before you spend a penny driving traffic to a page, read it as if you're the visitor, on your phone, slightly distracted. Can you tell in five seconds what this is and what you're meant to do? Is there exactly one action? Would a stranger believe your proof? If any answer is shaky, fix that before you touch your ads, because traffic to a leaky page just wastes money faster.
Then change one thing at a time. Swap the headline, leave everything else, and watch the number for a couple of weeks. If you change five things at once you'll never know which one helped. It's slow, and it's the only honest way to learn what your visitors respond to.
If you'd rather not guess your way through it, this is a lot of what we do at Unbury, building the page, writing the words, and watching what actually converts. You can see some of the work, or start with a free audit of the page you've already got.
It depends on the offer and the traffic, but for a free lead magnet with warm traffic, somewhere around 20 to 40 percent leaving an email is common. For a paid offer it's far lower. Rather than chasing a benchmark, watch whether your own number goes up when you improve the page.
Usually no. The menu across the top of a normal site is a set of exits, and on a landing page every exit is a way to leave without acting. Removing it often lifts conversion on its own.
As long as it needs to be to make the case, no longer. A free checklist needs very little. A high-priced programme needs more, because you're asking for a bigger leap and have more doubts to answer. Let the size of the ask decide the length.
Send us your setup and we will tell you honestly where your growth is stuck and what to fix first. Free, no pitch.