5 things that are killing your landing page

They are not so obvious as you might think.

10 min readDec 18, 2020

Landing page is a popular, yet quite specific kind of website. It often makes me wonder, why it is so hard these days, to find a landing page that is done well? It would seem that we, as product designers, owners and users, are design-aware enough (compared to 10 years ago) — yet there’s one simple thing that everyone seems to forget:

The major purpose of a landing page is to sell a product or an idea. Nothing more, nothing less.

Knowing that, we should design landing pages with a very strict list of goals in mind. It’s not a beauty or creativity competition. The page should be distinctive, yet not overwhelming. The message should be straight and to the point. The overall visual style should match the product’s characteristics. It should also be appealing to the target group. The shopping experience itself should be as quick, as easy and delightful as possible.

1. Mindlessly following trends

If I had to choose one thing that is killing the product design industry the most, it would be the mindless trend incorporating™.

Although I have nothing against trends itself, the worst thing that a designer or a product owner can do, is to copy every visual idea that everyone in the design world is currently obsessed with.

Your landing page is about selling a product — not about getting thousands of likes from other designers. A very fresh example — using 3D illustrations (because everyone does that now!) won’t necessarily guarantee you lots of sales. It can even work quite the opposite.

Incorporating a popular trend just to be like everyone else in the industry seems wrong from the start — this is an easy way to look just like everyone else and easily get lost in the crowd.
The way your landing page looks should be determined by what your target group is, not by what’s popular right now on Dribbble.
Think about the characteristics of your product. What style, colors and imagery would suit it the most? Maybe a real hand holding a real phone will serve your product better than the chubby, cartoonish 3D one?

2. Too much text (tl:dr)

No matter how amazing your product is, and how much you want to tell the world about it, there’s one thing that you should know:

Most people don’t really like to read.

That’s why you should be able and try to describe the idea or main benefit of your product in a single, powerful sentence. You need to you catch a visitor’s attention and interest in a first few seconds of a session.

A person visiting your page will most likely scroll through the content rather then go through every simple paragraph, and will most likely leave the page if there’s too much text.

Instead of long paragraphs of text, try to communicate the most essential things in short, understandable sentences. Cut the longer parts (for ex. testimonials) in half.
Make sure that the overall proportion of text and images on the landing page is at least 50:50. The text should be accompanied by images or data visualisations, or it will look too dull and heavy.

3. The CTA galore

The popular rule “less is more” also applies when it comes to CTA.

Contrary to the popular belief, putting 15 CTA’s one next to another, or repeating it under every single section of your landing page won’t necessarily result in higher conversion rates. It will more likely be just extremely irritating to your visitors.

The more repetitive the element, the less attention it catches. People tend to overlook things that are not distinctive enough.
Instead of putting the same 15 CTA buttons on your landing page, think about the one CTA button that just flows on the top of the page as the user scrolls down. This way it’s always visible and easily accessible, but not too aggressive.

4. Overcomplicated navigation

One of the main rules I follow as a designer is:

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. If something works great, then why overcomplicate it?

That why I absolutely dislike landing pages that have non-standard navigation. Users are so accustomed to scrolling down, it became a part of our human nature. We scroll down because it became completely intuitive for us.

So when I intuitively, automatically try to scroll down after entering the page, and nothing happens, I’m negatively surprised. Instead of focusing on a product, I spent time figuring out how the navigation works. Is is horizontal? Do I have to click on some link for the content to appear? Or do I just wait?

Scroll down is the best option when it comes to landing page navigation.
Don’t alter this UX pattern for the sake of making your website more creative or individual. It’s not worth it.
People are used to scrolling down and they do it automatically after entering the page — don’t disturb this natural flow.

5. Not doing any user tests

Unless you’re doing any user tests, you don’t really know if the landing page sells properly (well, if your sales count remains low, that might be an indicator).

The one thing about a landing page is that it constantly needs the owner’s attention.

Sometimes just a change in CTA’s color or label works miracles and can heavily influence conversion.

Do you need a group of UX experts to work on that? Not really. What everyone can do is to install a simple tool called Hotjar and take a look at how users interact with the website. One skilled designer with some usability knowledge and experience can analyze the numbers and recordings, and track down the problematic patterns. These incentives are always incredibly helpful and can lead to solid conclusions, resulting in boosting up your sales and overall visitor’s satisfaction.

Remember, that a freshly publicated website is just the beginning — the work never ends here. Make sure that the landing page reflects the spirit of your product, it’s distinctive enough, it catches attention from the start and it’s friendly for your visitors. Use tools to observe user’s behavior and constantly tailor your website so it meets the user’s needs!

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Want to learn UI? Get the “Designing Interfaces” book (rated ⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️️ 4.99 by our readers) with almost 500 pages of the most important knowledge about designing UI! I 🖋 write about design and I’m a 👩🏻‍💻 co-founder/lead designer at HYPE4 design-driven software agency. 3D images of hands used in this article are taken from the free library called Handz.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published in our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.