You have a website page that gets a decent amount of traffic. People land on it, they scroll through it, but they leave without taking the action you want them to take.
That’s the problem landing page optimisation is designed to solve. And it’s often approached in the same way: change the headline, move the button, change the button colour, try a different photo, run it for a fortnight and see what happens.
Sometimes such actions will produce results, there’s a lot of behavioural science work which digs into the impact of button colour and the like. Much of the time though, even if there’s a positive impact, it’s not enough to really move the needle.
What landing page optimisation can do
A landing page is any page on your website which someone arrives on from outside it. This could be from a search result, an ad, an email, a link someone shared; it doesn’t have to be a purpose-built page designed and developed for a marketing campaign. For most organisations, their busiest landing pages therefore are their service and product pages, pages that might never have been thought of as landing pages in the marketing or advertising sense at all.
Optimising one means making it more likely the people who arrive do what you want them to do: enquire, buy, book, get in touch. It might also mean that they stay longer, or scroll further, but we wouldn’t consider these metrics alone as worthy of chasing. Action is what’s generally key.
The distinction that matters when it comes to optimisation work is between page-level work and structural work. Page-level work covers everything you can change on the page itself: what it says, in what order, and what it asks for. Structural work in contrast is everything underneath: how the page is built, how fast it loads, how it behaves on a phone, whether the journey it sits in makes sense.
Both areas matter. Whether you need to focus more on one than another will be dependent upon your goals and how the page is currently performing.
Why most landing pages underperform
These are six common patterns we see regularly.
1. The page answers a different question to the one which brought people there
This is all too common, no matter the type of website. Often what happens is someone searches for the answer to a specific problem, clicks a result, and lands on a page that talks more about the organisation than their problem. For example, “We are a specialist provider with over twenty years of experience delivering high-quality solutions.” A stronger alternative sets out what makes them a specialist, what the solutions are, and how they solved people’s problems
2. The page asks for too much too soon
A form with eleven fields on a page someone reached only moments ago is asking for too much too soon. So might a “book a consultation” button on a page that hasn’t yet explained what the consultation will achieve.
The fix isn’t always fewer fields, or getting to the call to action sooner. Sometimes it’s earning the right to ask before asking.
3. The proof is missing, or it’s the wrong kind
- Weak: A row of client logos.
- Strong: We did this for this client and achieved this.
Logos lend credibility and can be impressive, they’re a good visual showcase of who has trusted you. We’re not advocating for their removal. However, they should be accompanied by specifics to give people confidence you can do for them what you’ve done for others.
4. It was designed on a desktop but it’s read on a phone
Across UK ecommerce, mobile now accounts for a majority of sales: 62.3% in July 2026, against 36.3% on desktop (source: IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, July 2026).
A page signed off by someone reviewing on a large screen and never fully reviewed on a small one will have a hierarchy that collapses: the thing you wanted people to see first might be four scrolls down, perhaps under an image that is pushing everything else off the screen.
5. It’s slow, and the reason it’s slow is structural
Speed is where things tend to move into requiring structural fixes. Compressing images will help but won’t move the needle if the page is loading excessive third-party scripts, a page-builder’s worth of unused code, and a font file for every weight of a typeface you use two of.
That isn’t a content or a design problem. It’s a build problem, and it needs someone who can go into the code to fix it properly rather than adding a caching plugin on top.
6. Nobody agreed what the page was for
If the page has to generate enquiries, explain a service, reassure existing clients, satisfy an internal stakeholder and rank for four different search terms because no one single objective was agreed, then it’ll likely do most or all of them adequately but none of them well.
Our approach to landing page optimisation
We don’t sell landing page optimisation as a separate service. In our experience it isn’t really a standalone service, rather we see it and approach it as a set of decisions that get made, or get skipped, while a site is being designed and built in the first place. Who the page is for, what it has to achieve, how it’s structured, how fast it is, how it behaves on a phone: all of that should be handled during the build so it’s not inherited as a problem afterwards. All of this we seek to answer at the early stages of a project.
Where it becomes its own piece of work is when a site is live and not performing. Even then, while optimisation might be focused on one particular page, the work should encompass as a minimum a review of the journey around that page. For online stores in particular, the page someone lands on is often three or four steps from where the money is actually being lost.
Where to start
If you have a page that gets traffic but doesn’t convert, the most useful first step is working out whether you’re looking at a page problem or a structural one.
There’s a straightforward way to tell. Make any relevant page-level improvements first, from those listed above. If the number moves and keeps moving, carry on. If it moves a little and then settles, the constraint is more likely to be underneath the page than on it, and further page-level work will keep meeting the same ceiling. That’s the point to look at how the page is built, how fast it is, and what happens either side of it in the journey, what we’ve called the Iceberg Effect.
If you’re at the beginning of a project rather than the middle of one, our guide to commissioning a website covers the decisions that stop most of this becoming a problem at all.
If you’re not sure which situation you’re in, get in touch and get clarity today We’ll look at the site as a whole and tell you what we’d actually do, including when the answer is that the page is fine and the problem is somewhere else entirely.
