The page that has to produce an action

A page whose job is to produce an action has a structure, and it is the same structure whether you sell a service, a product or a booking. Most pages that underperform are missing two of its parts rather than being badly designed.

The order

1. 01What it is and who it is for. One line, visible immediately, containing a noun. Not a promise with no subject.
2. 02Proof it is real. A photograph of the actual thing, the actual work, the actual premises. Something that could not be written.
3. 03What it does for them, stated so it could be wrong. A finished pricing sheet beats confidence in your pricing.
4. 04What it costs, or why there is no number and what happens instead.
5. 05The objections, in the order people have them: is this for me, will it work for my situation, how long, what if it does not help.
6. 06Whatever evidence you honestly have.
7. 07One action, repeated once lower down for people who scrolled.

The first screen decides most of it

Four elements, no more: what it is, who it is for, something visible, and the action. Everything else can wait until the reader has decided to stay.

What does not belong there: your story, a question aimed at the reader, the words imagine if, a slider, a video that must be watched first, or any sentence a competitor could use unchanged. The last test is the most useful one and almost every hero section fails it.

Writing it so it is believable

• Replace adjectives with measurements. Not high quality: the strap is 4cm wide and the leather stiffens in the first month.
• Say what it is not suitable for. Costs a few sales that would have returned anyway and buys trust on everything else.
• Use the customer's words for the problem, taken from actual messages rather than invented.
• Name the price, even if it is a range. Hiding it on a page with no sales process reads as a trap.
• Answer the awkward question yourself, before they ask it.

The length question

Long enough to answer the seven questions, no longer. A short page that leaves three unanswered loses people who would have bought; a long page padded to look thorough loses people before the answer.

A useful test: read the page and mark every sentence that answers a question a buyer actually has. If that is under half of it, the rest is decoration, and the decoration is between the reader and the answer.

The action itself

Underthought relative to everything above it. A button that says submit, learn more or get started tells the reader nothing about what is about to happen, and the uncertainty is itself a reason to hesitate.

• Say what happens: send the enquiry, book a call, buy it, see the prices. The verb should match the outcome.
• Say what it costs in effort: how long the form is, whether there is a payment on the next screen, whether anybody will telephone.
• Remove the friction immediately around it: the fifth field, the account requirement, the terms checkbox nobody can read.
• Put a line beneath it answering the last doubt: what happens next, how quickly, what it does not commit them to.

Watching one person use it

Worth more than any amount of reasoning about this, and most small businesses never do it. Find somebody who does not know the business, give them a plausible task, and watch without helping.

Three people is enough to find the things that are badly wrong, because the same hesitations repeat. You will watch somebody miss the thing you thought was obvious, hunt for a price that is on the page, and ask a question the page answers in a sentence they skipped. Each of those is a specific fix rather than an opinion.

What to do when it is not working

Resist redesigning it. Find out where people stop instead: how far down they get, which field they abandon, whether they reach the page at all. A page nobody scrolls has a first-screen problem, a page people scroll and leave has a missing answer, and a page people reach the form and abandon has a form problem. Those are three unrelated fixes, and guessing between them is how a quarter gets spent on the wrong one.