Landing Page vs Homepage: Which One Should You Send Traffic To?
Sending campaign traffic to your homepage asks the visitor to find their own way. What changes when you send it to a landing page instead, and when it should not.
You have visitors. The analytics say so. A few hundred a week, more after a campaign. What you do not have is enquiries, and the gap between those two facts is the whole problem.
The usual advice at this point involves the button. Make it bigger, make it orange, change the word on it. It is cheap advice, which is why it is everywhere. It is also close to the bottom of the list of things that decide whether anyone contacts you.
What a conversion rate measures, and the trap inside it
A conversion rate is a fraction. Enquiries on top, visitors underneath, over whatever period you choose. That is all it is, and the simplicity is where people get caught.
Both halves move on their own. When an ad budget runs down mid-month, the cheap broad traffic stops first (the curious, the ones who tapped a picture). Visitors fall. Enquiries fall too, but less steeply, because what remains is the keener sort. The rate climbs. The business got quieter.
It works the other way just as often. Widen your targeting, fill the page with people who were never going to buy, and a rate that looked healthy last month looks broken this month while nothing on the page has changed.
So read enquiries per week alongside the rate. Either number alone will mislead you eventually.
Lever one: the offer, and how it is phrased
The offer is what a visitor gets in exchange for filling in your form, and most pages never state one. They state a service. Commercial cleaning across Greater Manchester is a service. A written quote for your office, surveyed on site, within two working days is an offer.
The second one tells the reader what happens next. Enquiring is a small act of faith: you hand a stranger your phone number and then wait, with no idea what arrives or when. Anything that reduces the uncertainty in that wait raises the number of people willing to do it.
Name what they receive. A quote, a survey, a sample, a callback, a drawing. Not "more information".
Name when. Today, within two working days, by Friday. Vagueness here gets read as slowness.
Name the cost, including when there isn’t one. Free is worth saying plainly. So is £89 fixed. What loses enquiries is a page that will not hint at price, because silence is assumed to be hiding something.
Name who it is not for. A line like properties from three bedrooms upwards costs you the wrong enquiries and buys credibility with the right ones.
Lever two: form length and field choice
Every field is a question, and each one is answered twice, once with information, once with a decision about whether to bother. A visitor scanning a form does not read it. They measure it. A form that looks long gets a later, and later rarely arrives.
The test for each field is narrow: could you write the first reply without it? A name and one way to reach them is usually the entire answer. A short message box earns its place, because it lets the keen ones say what they actually need.
Everything else can be asked in that first reply, once a conversation is running and a question costs almost nothing. Company name is seldom needed to respond. Postcode earns its place if you work a service area and would otherwise waste the reply. Budget range and how did you hear about us are there for the business’s convenience, and they are paid for in enquiries.
Optional fields are not free either. They still have to be read and dismissed.
Lever three: how fast the page loads on a phone
Most of your traffic is on a phone, on mobile data, frequently outdoors. That is a different machine from the desktop the page was built on, and the gap is where enquiries quietly disappear.
Speed works mechanically rather than psychologically. Nobody watches a blank screen and concludes your business is unprofessional. They tap back, or switch apps and never return. The visit is counted; the departure is not explained.
The hero image is usually the culprit. A photograph straight out of a camera or a stock library is often far larger than it needs to be at the size it displays.
Scripts stack up. Three font families, a chat widget, a heat-map tracker and two analytics tags all load before the reader sees anything useful.
Test on a real phone, on mobile data, away from your office. Then hand it to someone who has never seen it and watch where their thumb hesitates.
Things that matter far less than people think
Button colour. A button needs to be visible, obviously a button, and big enough for a thumb. Past that, green versus orange is an argument about nothing. If the offer above it is vague, no colour rescues it.
The exact word on the button. Send, Get my quote, Request a callback. Each is worth a moment’s thought, not an afternoon’s. It matters far less than the sentence above it.
Fold dogma. The rule that everything must sit above the fold predates instinctive scrolling. Readers scroll happily. What they will not do is scroll past material that gives them no reason to continue.
Stock photography. A genuinely better photograph helps. Swapping one anonymous smiling team for another does not, and it is often what gets done instead of the harder work.
Where to start if you can only change one thing
Start with the offer. It costs an afternoon and it changes how everything else on the page reads.
Write one sentence saying what a visitor gets and when they get it. If you cannot write that sentence, the page cannot communicate it either, and no amount of form trimming will cover for it. Put it at the top, in the size you currently reserve for your own business name.
Then count your fields and delete the ones you could ask about later. Then load the page on your phone, on mobile data, and time it.
In that order. The offer sets the ceiling; the other two decide how much of it you collect.
Most of the pages we are asked to look at do not need a redesign. They need the offer said once, plainly, near the top, and a form short enough to finish at a bus stop.
