What makes a good landing page?

The above-the-fold test

Show the top of your page to someone unfamiliar with the product for five seconds, then ask them what it does and who it is for. If they cannot answer, nothing further down the page matters.

This is where most pages fail, and the cause is nearly always a headline written for insiders. Reimagine your workflow, the operating system for modern teams and unlock your potential are compatible with any product in any category. Replace them with what the product literally does, in the words a customer would use.

Stripe's developer-first positioning worked in part because the page said what the thing was and showed the code that did it. There was nothing to decode.

Show, do not describe

A screenshot, a short looping video, or an interactive demo outperforms paragraphs about capabilities. People assess software visually and quickly, and a product that will not show itself reads as a product with something to hide.

If a visitor can try it without signing up, let them. Removing the account requirement before first value is often the single largest conversion change available — Zoom's growth rested substantially on the fact that joining a meeting required neither.

Proof that persuades

Ranked roughly by strength:

1. Specific numbers from named customers. Cut onboarding from 6 weeks to 4 days.
2. Recognisable logos, if genuinely customers.
3. A quote with a real name, role and company.
4. Volume indicators — used by 40,000 teams.
5. Generic testimonials from unnamed people, which read as decorative and are widely ignored.

Anonymous praise is worse than no praise, because it signals you could not get permission to use a name.

One action

Decide what you want the visitor to do and make everything serve it. A page offering start free, book a demo, read the docs, join the community and subscribe to the newsletter has offered a menu, and menus produce deliberation rather than action.

The secondary path should exist for people not ready — but it should be visibly secondary, not a competing button of equal weight.

The technical layer people forget

Across 496 recent YC startup homepages we audited, the pattern was consistent: everything a visitor notices was nearly universal, and everything only a crawler or a scanner notices was a coin flip. Custom domains, mobile viewports and descriptive titles were near-100%. Structured data, content security policy and HSTS preload were far below half.

That gap matters more than it used to. A landing page is now read by search crawlers, by AI assistants deciding whether to cite you, and by security scanners in procurement reviews — none of which are impressed by your hero animation. Fast load, a real title and description, structured data, working links and clean HTML are conversion features.

Booking.com's conversion machine and Walmart's performance work both point the same direction: the unglamorous layer is where the measurable money is.