A short guide to landing page structure

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Everything we would tell a client about landing page structure in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Why this earns attention

Lead with the outcome, not the company history. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

How to approach it

One primary action per page beats five competing links. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Where it usually goes wrong

Proof belongs near the ask, not buried at the bottom. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

The short version

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about landing page structure before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Proof belongs near the ask, not buried at the bottom — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.