The landing page scorecard: 12 checks we run before anything goes live
An interactive checklist. Score your own landing page against the twelve things that most often decide whether a visitor converts or leaves.
Before a landing page goes live, we run it through the same twelve checks. None of them is clever. All of them are missed constantly, including by expensive pages built by well-known agencies. Use the scorecard below on a page you own and see where it lands.
How to read your score
85 or above. The page is doing the fundamentals. Improvements from here come from testing offers, creative and audience, not from fixing the page itself.
60 to 84. Something structural is holding the page back. The unchecked items are the shortlist; fix the heaviest ones first.
Below 60. The page is almost certainly losing most of its traffic before the offer is understood. Do not spend more on ads until it’s fixed.
The checks that matter most
The two heaviest items on the list are the headline and the single call to action, and they fail for the same reason: the page is trying to say everything. A landing page has one job. If the headline can’t be read aloud in a breath, and if there is more than one thing you want the visitor to do, the page is unfocused and every other improvement is working against the current.
The third is speed, which we’ve written about separately. A page that takes four seconds to load on a phone has already lost a large share of its paid traffic, and the ad budget that sent it.
Everything else is about trust and friction: proof that other people have done this, a form that asks only for what’s needed, a page that still makes sense on a phone, and no surprises after the click.
If you’d like us to run a full audit on a page, with the numbers behind it, ask us. It’s usually the first thing we do with a new client.
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