7 Landing Page mistakes that hurt your website conversions

You have been spending a lot of money purchasing ads, you have designed and optimized the ads to get many clicks, but no conversion - no leads. You double check to ensure no broken links and everything seems alright. So, why aren't you getting any leads?

A recent study done by MarketingSherpa reveals that about 44 percent of B2N clicks are often directed to a website's homepage rather than a dedicated landing page. Sending your ad traffic to the right landing page boosts your page relevance, an essential component of your site's Quality Score. Note that a website's Quality Score is an essential factor in the determination of your ad campaign results and expenses. It's safe to say that sending paid traffic to the wrong web page is simply a waste of time and other resources.

What is a landing page?

Landing page simply means a 'destination web page'. It's the web page where your site visitors land when they first reach your website. A landing page is an important concept for an inbound marketing strategy and lead generation. It is, therefore, a website page deliberately created to help a website owner convert the site visitors into leads because it offers you the means to capture the users' contact details.

Understanding what is a landing page and designing an attractive one is just a single element of a complicated equation. The truth is, even if you send your site's traffic to an optimized landing page, and ask your visitors many different things, everything might go southwards. With many components of your landing page shouting for attention and action, the site visitors are likely to feel overwhelmed and leave immediately.

That's bad news for both startups and established businesses. Here are the common landing page mistakes that might be killing your site's conversions.

1. Slow page load speed

You can do everything else perfectly, but if your landing page takes forever to load, don't expect conversions. People first need to view your landing page before taking any action. According to research, landing pages that don't load within five seconds loses about 74% of expected viewers. For e-commerce websites, this is even worse. Online stores that take more than three seconds (not five) lose 50% of their expected traffic. This is the primary reason the top brands globally focus on reducing page load time.

Check and improve your website page loading speed. In most cases, a couple of things such as too many redirects, unoptimized visuals, and the poor hosting choice could be slowing down your website. Get all these issues fixed to make your website pages load faster.

2. Many distractions

Most people believe that consumers should be presented with different options. More choice is better. Unfortunately, this concept doesn't work for a landing page, where there is only one goal. Today's business space is characterized by the scramble for limited attention, and too many choices put consumers (audience) in a state of indecisiveness.

Each additional element you include in your landing page reduces the importance of the major aspects of your page. By limiting the distractions, you guide the site visitors' attention towards the crucial items on your landing page. That means those 'dancing' ads should be gone, the navigation bar shouldn't be there, and the links in the footer section should be gone too.

3. Lack of a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Once you eliminate all distraction from your landing page, the first thing your site visitor should see is the top sales points you're sharing. Why should the user purchase your product or sign up for your mailing list? Your value proposition or unique selling proposition should communicate in a firm, clear voice what makes your products or services so special. Depending on the objective of creating the landing page, the USP could be the promotion you are offering, the product you are pushing or some performance statistics that make your company so unique that its customers can't help themselves to sign-up.

Most marketers make the mistake of confusing the value proposition and CTA (call-to-action). Remember, CTA turns the interest your value proposition (USP) creates into the action you want the prospect to take. So, USP and CTA must work hand in hand, but they aren't the same.

4. Not having a great preview of the item on offer and other related mistakes

According to experts, humans process visual information faster than verbal communication. Thus, visuals (videos, animations, images, and other graphics) mater a lot. So why don't you take advantage of them and make your landing page more attention grabbing? However, when done incorrectly, visuals can harm your landing page. For instance, most people use cheesy stock photos thinking that they make their landing pages prettier. But a pretty image isn't enough; relevance is the key. So, if you recently launched an eBook and created a landing page for it, use the picture of your book to give your audience an idea of what to expect.

Having no image at also a big mistake. An excellently-designed image can support your unique point of sale that you are communicating. Ensure that the visuals you provide stand out on your landing page and passes a clear message in a strong voice.

5. Not optimizing your website's landing page for search

The same way you write and optimize a website copy for SEO, you should optimize your landing page content. This is more important for small and medium-sized businesses with no huge budgets for ad campaigns and need their landing pages to rank better in the organic search results.

It's important to do in-depth keyword research before creating your headlines and product descriptions. Otherwise, you might end up with an excellent landing page that only converts as long as you keep on investing money in it (paid traffic). If no one is searching for the content on your landing web page, it will never rank well.

6. Your CTAs are confusing your prospects

Call to action is an integral component of every highly converting landing page. After all, what's the point in having your audience visit your landing page and leave? Many digital marketers place multiple CTAs on a landing page. Perhaps they think if a visitor doesn't like the first or second CTA, there is a third option. As mentioned earlier, many distractions can kill your landing page's conversion. It's recommended to place a single CTA your dedicated landing page.

You can also play with the colors, urgency, and copy of your CTA to find an ideal mix for your dedicated landing page. For instance, you can use an action verb (start, get, try or do), use 'you' rather than 'my' and be very specific about what the prospect will get.

7. Poor mobile experience

According to statista.com, 52.2% of the global online traffic (in 2018) was generated through mobile devices. Surprisingly, mobile search accounted for 50.3% in 2017. Thus, the number of web users turning to mobile devices is increasing. Given these numbers, there is a high probability that more than half of the number of visitors to your landing page use smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. If your landing page can't be viewed and navigated well on a mobile device (not optimized for mobile experience), you're losing your brand's credibility and money.

Besides, mobile device users have different intents, high distractions, and different expectations that aren't always in line with other prospects interacting your landing page on desktops. To get the most out of your landing page, avoid using large blocks of text. Make sure the page is readable and ensure the CTA buttons are big enough.


Each of the eight landing page mistakes discussed here is easy to make. But as you have realized, they are all easy to fix. Just check your landing page once more, analyze it, and fix all the issues that might be hurting its conversions.