7 Reasons Your Landing Page Sucks, And How to Avoid It

by Sabih Javed | Feb 14, 2019 | Blog | 195 comments

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A landing page is one of the most important parts of a marketing funnel. A well-designed and optimized landing page will generate heaps of leads. It has the potential to make or break your brand. Unfortunately, a lot of marketers and businesses don’t make the best use of landing pages. In fact, most of them repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

End result?

Their landing pages suck.

I have listed 7 reasons why your landing page might be failing and how to avoid it. If you’re struggling with your landing page, this article is sure to provide you with actionable tips.

Let’s get started.

1. No clear goal

The objective that you intend to achieve with your landing page should be crystal clear. When you don’t know what exactly you’re trying to achieve with a landing page, your page won’t lead you anywhere. Things get worse when you try to achieve too much with a single landing page. And that’s one reason why your landing page isn’t working.

The landing page below is trying to pitch everything which makes it confusing.

How to avoid this mistake

The unique selling proposition should be clear and should stand out. Make sure visitors don’t have to ‘guess’ what you’re trying to offer. Everything should be crystal clear and unambiguous with a single goal.

Be clear.
Be to-the-point.
Set clear goals for every landing page you create.
Don’t try to sell everything with one landing page.

2. Too few landing pages

When it comes to landing pages, the more is better.

Statistics show that having more than 40 landing pages increase conversion rate by a whopping 500% as opposed to having 10 – 15 landing pages which increase conversions by 55% only.

How to avoid it

The rule is simple: Create multiple landing pages.

Create landing pages for buyer personas, based on goals, target markets, offers, headlines, CTAs, and more.

Test. Test. Test.

More landing pages mean that you’ll have more data for decision-making. You can easily figure out what works and what doesn’t.

3. Slow load time

One of the biggest reasons why your landing page sucks could be that it has a poor load time. If your landing page takes more than three seconds to load, as much as half a million visitors are expected to leave it.

If this wasn’t scary enough, try this: A 100-millisecond delay in landing page load time can drop conversions by 7%.

How to avoid it

Improve the load time of your landing pages. While there is no universal best load time but statistics show that if your page loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than 75% of all the websites out there and if it loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than 50% of all the websites on the internet.

Here is where to begin.

Inspect your landing page’s load time with PageSpeed by Google. Follow all the recommendations to improve the load time. You might be able to fix most of the highlighted issues. There are some that an expert can handle.

Here are a few general actionable tips on improving load time:

Minify files
Upgrade to a better host
Use CDN
Use web caching
Reduce server requests

4. Ineffective call to action(s)

When your landing page doesn’t have a specific aim, you end up adding multiple CTAs that lead to nowhere, in fact, ineffective CTAs confuse visitors.

The following landing page has two different CTAs which send mixed messages.

A CTA that’s not inspiring enough is another mistake that marketers make very often. Here is an example.

How to fix this landing page pitfall

Stick with a single CTA.

When there is a need to use multiple CTAs, all of them should be consistent and should target the same offer. The best approach is to link CTAs to your landing page’s goal.

One offer, one goal, one landing page, and one CTA at a time.

Besides, your CTA should be persuasive. It should be strong enough to encourage visitors to click and take action.

5. Not mobile responsive

A good number of landing pages aren’t mobile responsive. If your landing page doesn’t work on mobile or other devices, you’ll lose a good chunk of visitors. When as much as 52.2% of all online traffic is generated through mobile phones, you cannot afford to have a poor mobile experience.

How to fix it

Use a landing page builder that’s mobile responsive. Opt for themes that are mobile-friendly. Use single column layouts for mobile and get rid of any unnecessary codes (especially JavaScript).

Use Google’s mobile-friendly test to figure out how easily visitors can view your landing page on a mobile device.

6. Not making your brand trustworthy

Your buyers have several concerns about your offer and brand, especially if they’re seeing your brand for the very first time. Not making your brand trustworthy on a landing page is a serious mistake that can deteriorate everything. However, this mistake gets too little attention.

Why?

Because businesses assume that their offer is unmatched and it will sell.

Don’t fall into this trap.

How to fix this landing page blunder

Make your brand and product trustworthy.

Research shows that 70% of consumers read a product review before making a purchase and reviews are 12x more trusted than the product description.

The best way to do is to use social proof, testimonials, reviews, awards, case studies, and so on. There are several ways to do it right.

For instance, offering a money-back guarantee on your ecommerce store will persuade a lot of first-time visitors to go for a purchase.

7. Poorly designed forms

A poorly optimized form on your landing page will ruin conversions. Even those who are interested in your offer might abandon your page if the form is too lengthy, poorly designed, and isn’t optimized.

Here is an example.

Will you take the time to fill out this long form?

Don’t let this happen to your landing page.

How to fix this landing page challenge

Use a decent form builder that’s mobile-friendly. Keep form fields to a minimum as short forms perform better in terms of conversions. Don’t ask something that you don’t intend to use. Only ask what’s relevant.

Optimize your forms for conversions. Test and tweak on a continuous basis.