Ads buy attention. The landing page decides what happens to it. Money spent sending traffic to a page that is not ready is money spent discovering that the page is not ready, and that is an expensive way to run a test you could have run for free.
The checks below are the ones we apply before a campaign goes anywhere near a page. They are all things you can verify on your own page this afternoon.
One goal, written down as a sentence
Write what the page is for in one sentence, out loud, as a thing a visitor does. “A parent looking for maths help creates an account.” Not “raise awareness of our tutoring offering.”
If two people on the project write two different sentences, stop. That disagreement will show up as two competing buttons, and the visitor will resolve it by leaving. A page cannot ask for two decisions at once.
This is also the discipline that separates a landing page from a homepage. A homepage serves everyone who arrives from anywhere. A landing page serves one audience arriving from one ad with one thing in mind, and it is allowed to ignore everybody else.
One action, repeated
The Your-Tutor website has one job: turn a parent or student looking for help into an account. So the home page states the offer in three lines and repeats Join Now in the header, in the hero, and again after the proof. Same words, same button, three chances to act at the three points where a reader is most likely to be ready.
The Enrol site takes the same rule further. Sign up for free is the only primary button on the page. Everything else is a quiet secondary, deliberately, because the page has one decision to sell and every additional emphasis dilutes it.
Repetition is not the same as clutter. Repeating one action three times down a page is clarity. Offering three different actions once each is a menu, and menus are for people who already know you.
State the mechanic, not just the promise
Most landing pages stop at the promise and leave the reader guessing at how it works. The gap between “we help you find work” and understanding what actually happens is where people bounce.
Enrol sells an inverted hiring model, so the headline says it plainly — get matched with a job you love, anywhere — and the sub-line spells out the mechanic: companies apply to you, with salary details upfront. Two lines, and the reader knows what the product does, what is unusual about it, and what they get that they do not get elsewhere.
The test: cover everything on your page below the fold and read what is left. Can a stranger say what happens after they click, and why this is different from the last three of these they saw? If not, no amount of ad spend fixes it.
Let the reader see themselves on the page
Enrol’s layout runs a single red diagonal across the page, which lets a portrait and a cluster of tag pills share one band without a box around either. The pills carry equity, remote only, React, Python, mentorship, a salary figure.
Those pills do the work a paragraph of explanation would. A visitor reads their own preferences back and sees, in one glance, what the matching actually runs on. Specificity does that; adjectives do not. “Personalised job matching” tells a reader nothing. Six real tags tell them whether this product is for them.
Proof, positioned where the doubt is
A visitor from an ad has two questions after the offer lands: is anyone else using this, and does it cover my case.
On the Your-Tutor site, a row of figures and a popular-topics band sit directly under the fold and answer exactly those two, in that order. Enrol closes its fold with a short quote and a company count. Both are placed at the point in the scroll where the doubt appears, rather than parked in a testimonials section three screens down that most readers never reach.
Use what you actually have. Real numbers, real customer names, a real quote with a real person attached. A landing page with invented proof is worse than a landing page with none, because the reader who checks and finds nothing has learned something about you.
Speed, because you paid for the click
You are buying visitors on a mobile connection. A page that takes six seconds on a mid-range phone has spent your budget on people who never saw it.
The usual culprits are boring and fixable: an uncompressed hero image, an autoplaying video, four web fonts, and a stack of third-party scripts that load before the page renders. Test on a real phone on mobile data, not on office wifi with a desktop browser.
Fast pages are mostly the result of not adding things. That is easier before a page is built than after.
The form is the page
Everything above the form exists to get someone to the form, and the form is where most of the loss happens.
Count the fields and ask which of them could be asked after the person has value in hand rather than before. Phone number, company size and how did you hear about us can all wait. Errors must say what went wrong and how to fix it, next to the field, and the form must keep what was typed when something fails.
Then check what happens after submit. A page that goes silent after a click reads as failure, and a visitor who is not sure whether the form worked will submit it again or leave.
Design it at every width, not just the one you looked at
Most ad traffic is on a phone, and most landing pages are designed on a laptop. The Your-Tutor site was laid out at four widths, with the type scale, the button set and the palette defined once as a system the rest of the pages reuse. Doing that up front is what stops the mobile version from being a squashed afterthought where the button lands below three screens of text.
Check the real thing on a real device before spending: is the primary action reachable with a thumb, is the headline still two or three lines, and does the proof still sit near the doubt it answers.
Decide the number you will judge it on
One goal means one metric. Sign-ups, or qualified enquiries, or bookings. Not sessions, not time on page, not bounce rate.
Set up the tracking before the campaign runs, and confirm a test submission arrives where you expect it — in the inbox, in the CRM, in analytics as a conversion. A campaign that runs for three weeks and produces no reliable count of what it did is the most expensive mistake on this list, and it is entirely preventable.
Before you set the budget
Open your page on your own phone. Read only what is visible without scrolling and write down what you think the product does and what you are being asked to do. Then count the primary buttons on the page, count the form fields, and time the load on mobile data.
If any of those four answers surprises you, fix the page before you fund the campaign. That is usually a week of work, and it changes the return on everything you spend afterwards.
If you want it built properly, single-purpose pages measured on one number are part of what we do as a website and landing page design agency. If you would rather have the current page reviewed first, our free 15-point UX audit returns a ranked list of what to fix within one working day.