What Marketers Fix First on Landing Pages to Improve Results
Landing pages fail for predictable reasons, and marketers who know where to look can fix them fast. This article compiles proven corrections from conversion experts who have tested thousands of pages and identified the friction points that kill results. These insights reveal exactly which changes deliver the biggest improvements in performance.
Lead With Fear Focused Headline
When a landing page is underperforming, I go straight to the data. The first thing I look at is the heatmaps and session recordings. Where are people dropping off? What are they clicking that isn't clickable? Are they even scrolling past the fold? That tells me more than any gut feeling ever could.
But here's what I've learned after years of optimizing law firm landing pages: most underperforming pages fail at one specific moment. The visitor arrives, reads the headline, and feels nothing. No connection. No "this is exactly what I need." They bounce. My first question is always: does this headline speak directly to the person's fear or urgency? Not the firm's credentials. Not a clever tagline. The actual problem keeping that person up at night.
One case involved a personal injury firm. Their page was getting solid traffic but terrible conversion rates. We reviewed the recordings and users were scrolling quickly, not pausing on anything. The headline was something generic about "experienced attorneys fighting for you." Technically fine. Emotionally empty.
We changed the headline to address the specific fear someone in a car accident actually has: uncertainty about medical bills and whether they had a case worth pursuing. One headline change. We also tightened the subheadline to promise a free, no-obligation call with a real attorney. Conversions jumped significantly within two weeks.
What guided that choice was simple. The traffic was qualified. People wanted to be there. The page just wasn't meeting them where they were emotionally. When traffic quality isn't the problem, the message is. Before changing design, layout, colors, or button placement, fix the message first. Everything else is decoration if the headline doesn't grab the right person immediately.
Clear Obstructions Revealed By Recordings
I begin with what the data shows people actually doing, rather than my own hunch about the design. More often than not, a session-recording tool like Microsoft Clarity points me straight to the first change, because it shows me exactly where attention falls away.
On one client page I found a chat widget sitting directly over the checkout button on mobile, so visitors simply couldn't tap it, and moving that one element recovered conversions I had been blaming on the copy. My first move now is almost always the friction I can watch happen in the recordings, long before I touch a headline or an offer.
Elevate Proof To Build Confidence
We usually look for the narrowest bottleneck rather than the loudest one. Many teams react to low conversion by changing the whole page, but we focus on where intent breaks. Heatmaps and session recordings often make this clear. When users hover and scroll and then pause near proof points, it often means confidence is missing.
In those cases, we focus on building belief instead of changing the structure. We once improved results by moving strong evidence higher on the page. We added a clear client outcome and a trusted signal at the top. This helped visitors feel confident early instead of searching for reassurance.
Tighten Intro And Sequence Benefits
The first change is rarely a full redesign. It is usually a surgical adjustment based on where intent and structure stop aligning. A page can attract the right audience and still lose them if the narrative opens too wide or reaches the ask too late. Refined digital experiences often keep momentum by revealing information in the exact order a buyer needs it, which makes diagnosis easier when results are weak.
One first change that delivered better performance was replacing a long introductory block with a sharper opening, followed by three scannable benefit points. We chose that after heatmaps showed visitors skimming but not committing to the first screen. That change worked because the page became easier to process quickly, which improved comprehension before attention had a chance to fade.
Shorten Forms To Boost Completions
Honestly, I never start by changing the design. I dig into the data first and look at how people are actually using the page. Things like conversion rates, scroll behavior, and form drop offs usually make it pretty clear where the friction is coming from.
In one case, I shortened a law firm's consultation form from 10 fields to 4. The data showed visitors were making it all the way to the form but not completing it. After simplifying it, conversions jumped by 28% in under two months. The issue wasn't traffic. It was the amount of effort required to submit the form.
Clarify Objectives And Align Flow
When a landing page is underperforming, you must first figure out why before attempting any changes. You also have to define what underperforming means in context of your overall strategy.
Start by identifying the goal of the page. If its primary function is informational with lead generation as a secondary objective, but the first thing users see is a giant form asking for their information, they will likely bounce without completing the form or exploring the rest of the page. In that case, the first change would be to place informational content, such as a hero image or video, above the fold, and move the lead generation form to the bottom. You could also add a sticky tab on the side that follows the user as they scroll.
There are no simple tips or tricks to automatically make your landing page better. Instead, there are questions you need to ask first, and the answers to those questions will inform how you can fix your landing page.
First, know the goal of the page. If you are not achieving that goal, consider whether you have given yourself enough time. If the page has only been live for one month, you likely need more data, at least a quarter.
Next, examine what is driving traffic to your site. If the answer is nothing, your site is not underperforming; it has not had the opportunity to perform. Additionally, if there are traffic drivers, ask whether those drivers are aligned with the goal of the landing page. If they are not, then you probably do not have a landing page problem, you have a driver problem. Your dots need to be better connected.
Direct The Eye With Purpose
Users scan landing pages to check if they're in the right place before they commit to reading the page in detail. A successful page layout will make the visual journey watertight to be sure of capitalising on this initial foray.
When a landing page isn't converting as it should, I read the visual clues first. Where does the eye flow easily, and where does it get stuck? At what point is attention diverted away by an erroneous graphic, or the absence of a CTA offering more info.
Very often that's the key to getting the page to convert; could be too much white space or background graphics pointing in the wrong direction. As a designer, you know when you've got it right; your eyes literally can't look anywhere other than where you're meant to - and then it starts to convert better.
Meet Searcher Expectations Immediately
When a property or enquiry page underperforms, my first change is never cosmetic. Before touching colours, images, or button styles, I fix the headline and opening message so they match what the searcher actually wanted when they clicked. A page can look beautiful and still convert poorly if the promise at the top does not answer the intent that brought the visitor, so message match is where I always start.
For one neighbourhood enquiry page, the original headline described the development in our own internal language, while the people landing on it had searched to understand whether the area suited an international buyer and what it cost to live there. I rewrote the headline and the first lines to speak directly to that question, before changing anything visual. Enquiries from that page improved clearly, with no redesign involved. The principle I work from: the first change that usually drives the most improvement is aligning the message with the searcher's real intent, because no amount of polish rescues a page that answers the wrong question. Match the promise to the search first, then refine the look.
Address Repeated Questions Upfront
When a landing page underperforms, I never start with guesses about color or layout. I pull up support tickets and sales call notes first, since that's where the real confusion usually shows up. If prospects keep asking the same question on a call, the page never answered it clearly enough to begin with.
That's exactly what happened with our trial page last year. Firms kept asking our sales team what the free trial actually included, even though we explained it on every call. I read through a stack of those conversations myself. The headline was describing our product instead of telling firms what they'd walk away with.
We rewrote it to say firms could import 14 cases and try Chronicle free within a month, nothing vaguer than that. Trial signups jumped almost immediately, and our sales team stopped fielding the same question on every call.
Shrink Effort At The Action
When a landing page is underperforming, my instinct is to scroll past the headline and look at what I'm asking visitors to give up. Every form field, every required decision, every moment where someone has to pause and think is a place they can leave. The fastest win I've gotten has come from reducing friction in the action itself.
On one page I cut form fields from six down to two, keeping only what I needed to fulfill the next step. The call-to-action button had said something vague, so I rewrote it to describe exactly what happens when you click. Those two changes moved conversion more than any headline rewrite I had tested on that page.
A visitor who already scrolled to the button has already bought in emotionally. If they bounce there, the page lost them on effort. So I start by shrinking the effort at the point of action, and I work backward from there.
Strengthen Pathways To And Through Page
When a landing page is underperforming, I wouldn't start with a redesign by default. The first step is to understand where the problem is happening. Is the page not getting enough attention at all? Are users reaching it but leaving quickly? Are they interested, but not taking the next step?
Not every page on a website is meant to attract the same amount of traffic, and that's normal. Some pages support trust, some help users compare options, and some exist closer to conversion. But if a page is important for the business and still stays almost invisible, the first change I would consider is giving it more weight inside the website: adding relevant internal links, highlighting it in related sections, connecting it from stronger pages, and making the path to it feel natural. This can work surprisingly well because sometimes the page itself is not the main issue. The issue is that users simply don't reach it at the right moment in their journey.
In another case, the bottleneck was different. We had a campaign where some geographies were getting traffic, but the number of leads was lower than expected. Analytics showed that people were reaching the form, but were not comfortable leaving more data than the first step really required. So the first change was not visual. We adapted the form for that geo, removed unnecessary fields, and made the first contact easier.
The lesson is that the first change should be guided by the place where the user path breaks. A good landing page is not only about design, but also meeting the user at the right stage and asking for the right level of commitment.
Optimize Toward Revenue Not Vanity Steps
When a landing page underperforms, the first change I make isn't to the design, it's to the metric. I make sure the page is optimized toward the action that actually pays me, and that I'm measuring THAT action and not a vanity step before it.
I run Green Planet Cleaning Services in the SF Bay Area, and our biggest conversion lesson came from our online estimate page. It looked fine, but it wasn't producing customers. The real fix wasn't visual. We realized we'd been counting "estimate started" as our conversion, so all of our ad budget was chasing people who got a quote and vanished. The moment we switched our tracking to count actual paid bookings instead of quote-starts, the whole picture flipped. We could finally see which traffic became revenue, and the "underperforming" page turned out to be a measurement problem more than a layout problem.
The change that delivered better results: tying conversion tracking to real charges through our payment platform rather than form-fills. It instantly exposed which campaigns were profitable and which were just busy. That single reframe later gave me the confidence to cut a large chunk of paid spend, because the data finally told the truth about what the page and the traffic were doing.
What guided the choice was a simple belief: a page that converts lookers into leads but never into customers isn't winning, it's just generating motion. So my rule is always align the call-to-action and the metric with money first, then test headlines and layout. Optimizing toward the wrong action is how you end up with a beautiful page that quietly loses money.
- Marcos De Andrade, Founder, Green Planet Cleaning Services
Unify Offer With Source Promise
Check Reply Rates Before Creative
When a landing page underperforms, most teams default to changing creative first. Headlines, hero images, copy tone. That's guessing, not fixing.
What we do in our ORM work at FameNinja is check the step before the landing page. If cold outreach drove traffic, we pull reply rates from the sequences. If paid ads drove it, we check clickthrough by creative. If organic, we check what keywords brought visitors.
The landing page is rarely the first problem. The traffic quality is.
One campaign targeting crypto founders had a 2% landing page conversion rate. Terrible on paper. But when we reviewed the cold email performance, we found the problem immediately. The sequence talked about reputation repair in the opening line. That was accurate. But it also filtered for companies already in crisis mode. The landing page was written for preventive reputation work, not crisis response.
We changed the landing page headline from "Protect Your Brand Before It's Too Late" to "Remove Negative Content Fast." The CTA changed from "Schedule a Strategy Call" to "Get a Removal Quote in 24 Hours."
Conversion rate went to 9% in four days. Same traffic source. Same cold email sequence. Different message match.
The rule we follow now: before touching any landing page element, check what the traffic source promised and whether the page delivers on that promise. If the answer is no, fix the mismatch. If the answer is yes, then test creative.
Target Bottom Funnel Queries With Specifics
When a landing page is underperforming, my first change is to realign the page to a clear bottom-of-funnel intent by updating the headline, core copy, and call to action so the page directly answers what that searcher wants. One example that delivered better results was reworking a page to target a bottom-funnel keyword and making the value proposition and CTA immediately clear. That choice was guided by filtering keywords by intent, difficulty, and monthly search volume and by the principle that pages that give users exactly what they want convert better. I then measured engagement and conversion signals to confirm the improvement.
Center The Hero On Visitor Need
As a web design agency owner, the first thing I look at is whether the landing page matches the visitor's intent. In my experience, that's a much bigger factor than changing button colours or adjusting the layout. If someone clicks an ad or finds your page through Google expecting one thing but lands on a page that talks about something else, they're far less likely to convert.
One change that has consistently delivered better results is rewriting the hero section. Instead of leading with a generic headline like "Welcome to Our Company," I focus on the specific service the visitor is looking for, explain the value in a sentence or two, and include a clear call-to-action above the fold. I also remove unnecessary navigation and distractions so visitors have one obvious next step.
I saw this make a noticeable difference for one of our clients who was sending traffic to a general services page. We created a dedicated landing page focused on that single service, rewrote the headline to match the search intent, simplified the messaging, and made the contact form more prominent. Without changing the advertising campaign, the page generated more qualified enquiries because visitors immediately understood they were in the right place.
Many businesses assume an underperforming landing page needs a complete redesign. More often, the biggest gains come from making the page more relevant to the audience that is already visiting it. When the message matches the visitor's intent and the next step is obvious, conversions usually improve.
Observe Behavior To Spot Hidden Confusion
The first move for us is almost always the same: stop guessing and go watch what people are actually doing on the page. We lean heavily on Microsoft Clarity for this. Session recordings, heatmaps, rage clicks — the whole thing. And it's basically free, which still surprises me given how much it's changed the way we work.
The thinking is simple. When a landing page underperforms, there are usually a dozen theories floating around — the headline, the price, the CTA, the images, the load speed. Everyone's got an opinion. But opinions don't fix conversion rates. Actually seeing where people hesitate, scroll back, hover for too long, or bail — that fixes conversion rates. So the first change we make is never a change. It's an hour of watching recordings.
The most impactful example: our product landing pages weren't converting the way we thought they should, and Clarity showed us something we'd genuinely missed. We sell refurbished devices, and each one comes with a grade — basically the condition tier. Users kept hovering over the grade info, clicking around it, sometimes going back to search "what does grade A mean," and then dropping off. We'd assumed the labels were self-explanatory. They weren't. People were confused, and confused people don't buy.
The fix was almost embarrassingly simple. We added visual reference photos showing what each grade actually looks like — real device, real condition. That was it. Conversion on those pages jumped, and the drop-off around the grade section basically disappeared.
Clarity has driven a lot of other fixes for us too — filter improvements on category pages, a login bug in the cart we'd never have caught otherwise, small friction points that added up. But that grade example is the one I always come back to, because it captures the whole lesson: the problem is rarely what you think it is, and the person browsing your site is telling you exactly what's wrong. You just have to actually look.
So my advice to anyone starting from scratch: before you A/B test anything, before you rewrite a headline, before you hire a CRO consultant — install Clarity, watch 20 recordings of your underperforming page, and I'd bet money you'll spot the real problem inside the first ten.
Pinpoint Dropoffs State Real Prices
We watch session recordings before changing anything, specifically looking for where people stop scrolling rather than where they click.
Click data tells you what worked. Scroll depth tells you what people never reached, which is usually where the problem is hiding. A landing page for a service client was converting at roughly 1.4 per cent, well below what traffic quality and source suggested it should be. The instinct was to rewrite the headline or change the CTA button colour, which is where most people start.
Session recordings showed that around 70 per cent of visitors were stopping at the same point — a section about a quarter of the way down that mentioned pricing structure in vague terms. People weren't bouncing from the top. They were reaching one specific ambiguity and leaving.
We rewrote that section with actual price ranges rather than "custom pricing based on your needs."
Conversion rate moved from 1.4 per cent to roughly 3.1 per cent over the following three weeks without changing anything else. The headline had been fine. The trust problem was sitting somewhere that visitors were reaching, and we hadn't been looking there.
Run Single Variable Tests Trust Outcomes
Stronger hooks, different imagery, different CTAs. Can't tell you how many times we've seen "specific" CTAs underperform compared to basic stuff. But, as is always the case, the final decision comes after testing. A single variable A/B test is your best friend.
Use A Phone And Fresh Perspective
Before I change a thing, I do something extremely basic. I pull the page up on my phone and try to read it as a total stranger would, someone who landed there by accident. Two questions only: do I actually get what this is offering, and is it buried under stuff that does not matter?
The person who built a page is the worst judge of it, because they already know what every line means. A stranger feels the confusion straight away. Whatever trips me up first is what I fix.
Let Visitors Try The Core Task
My first change is usually not the headline; it is the first action the visitor is being asked to take. On one product surface, the page improved once the first screen behaved like the actual tool instead of a pitch: visitors could paste a YouTube link and understand the exact output before reading supporting copy. That choice came from watching where intent was already high. If someone arrives looking for a specific workflow, the page has to prove the workflow first and persuade second.
