Two landing pages for the same service, the same ad traffic: one converts at 1.2%, the other at 5.8%. Their design budgets were identical. The gap is made of eighteen details, most of them fixable in half a day without touching the layout. Below is the full list by block — hero, offer, proof, form, speed, mobile — with what each element does to your enquiry rate and the order to tackle it in.

The hero: six elements that decide whether anyone reads on

Roughly half the people arriving from an ad never scroll past the first screen. Everything needed to decide "I will stay" has to be visible without scrolling — on a phone as well, not only on the designer’s 27-inch monitor.

1. 1The headline names the outcome, not the company. "Fitted kitchens delivered in 30 days" works; "Welcome to our website" does not. It should echo the ad copy almost word for word — click "fridge repair within 2 hours", land on "integrated household solutions", and the tab closes before anyone works out they are in the right place.
2. 2The subheading removes the main objection in one or two lines. Price, timeline, geography, who it is for. One line of specifics here outperforms three screens of benefits further down.
3. 3One primary action per screen. Two equally weighted buttons split attention and reduce clicks on both. Make the secondary action a text link, not a second bright button.
4. 4Real proof of the product instead of a stock photo. An interface screenshot, your actual work, the product in someone’s hands. A smiling stock person with a laptop quietly reads as "nothing genuine is being shown here".
5. 5Trust markers inside the hero. Projects delivered, years in business, two or three recognisable logos. Three numbers work; ten unknown logos do not.
6. 6A price anchor. The most contested item here, and our position is: if you sell at the higher end, show a range. Enquiry conversion drops 10–20%, but enquiry-to-sale conversion rises further, because you stop spending hours on budgets a third the size of yours.

Offer and proof: why anyone should believe you

From here on the visitor is looking for a reason to leave. Every element that follows answers a specific objection they will never voice but definitely hold.

• The offer is phrased as an exchange. "A free itemised quote within 24 hours" is an exchange: you give time, I give a contact. "Leave a request" is not an exchange, it is a favour being asked.
• Testimonials with a name, a face and specifics. "Great service, highly recommend" with no surname performs worse than no testimonial at all — it hints the rest of the page is invented too.
• One expanded case study with numbers. "We built a website" is nothing. "We rebuilt the catalogue and enquiries went from 12 to 34 a month" is evidence — and beats six logos in a row.
• Risk removal. A money-back guarantee, a free first stage, a fixed-scope contract. This directly addresses "what if it does not work out" — the objection that stops the largest number of people.
• An objections block in question-and-answer form. Four to six uncomfortable questions with honest answers. As a bonus, that block can be exposed to search engines as FAQ structured data and earn an expanded snippet.

Form and button: where half the ready enquiries disappear

The most galling loss happens at the end, after someone has already decided to get in touch. Four elements deserve checking first, because each is costing money today.

• Minimum fields. A name and one contact channel. In our projects each extra required field costs 3–7% of submissions, and "job title" or "how did you hear about us" is almost always answerable from UTM tagging.
• The button describes the result, not the effort. "Get my quote" versus "Submit". The second reminds people that they are handing something over, and it shows up in the click rate.
• Errors appear next to the field, immediately. A form that turns red on submit and wipes what was typed loses up to a third of already-committed people. Validate while typing.
• A separate thank-you screen. Without one you cannot measure conversion at all, and you lose the cheapest extra touchpoint — it is a good place to offer a messenger channel or the next step.

Three technical things without which the other elements do not matter

These three cover the case where a page "looks fine" and still produces nothing. If 70% of traffic is mobile and the page was designed on a desktop, you are optimising copy for the minority: start from the phone screen and build the desktop up from there.

The order to work through this in

1. 1

   Measurement first, everything else after

   Until form submissions, button clicks and phone taps are tracked as events, every change is faith rather than work. This is one evening of setup.

2. 2

   Speed and the mobile experience

   Technical fixes need no client approval and affect all traffic at once rather than a single block on the page.

3. 3

   The hero, rewritten for specific ads

   The biggest gain for the least effort. If several ads promise different things, build several hero variants rather than one compromise headline that fits none of them.

4. 4

   The form and the thank-you page

   Cutting a form from six fields to three has produced 20–40% more submissions in our projects. It remains the cheapest change with a measurable effect.

5. 5

   Only then, A/B testing

   To detect a 20% difference at a 2% baseline you need roughly 3,000 visits per variant. At 500 visits a month, testing does not work — sequencing and judgement do. The prioritisation method is in our guide to conversion rate optimisation.

Frequently asked questions about landing page conversion

In short

• The hero decides half the outcome: a headline echoing the ad, one primary action, real proof of the product.
• Every block should remove a specific objection. A block that removes none is decoration.
• A three-field form and a button that names the result beat any redesign.
• Speed and mobile are preconditions, not improvements — without them nothing else gets a chance to work.
• A/B testing starts making sense at roughly 3,000 visits per variant. Below that, ship the obvious things in order.