Your website has one job
A website exists to turn visitors into customers. Everything else is decoration. Here's how I audit a site against that standard.
Every website I've ever been hired to fix had the same underlying problem: it was built to impress, not to sell. Impressive is nice. But impressive doesn't pay invoices.
Your website has one job - turning visitors into customers. That's it. Not winning awards, not showing off the animation library, not "reflecting the brand" in the abstract. When someone lands on your site, they're quietly asking three questions:
- What does this company do for me?
- Can I trust them?
- What do I do next?
If your homepage answers all three in the first screen, you're ahead of most of the internet. If it doesn't, nothing else matters - because visitors don't scroll past confusion. They leave.
How to test yourself
Give your homepage to someone who's never seen it, for five seconds. Then ask:
- What does this company sell?
- Who is it for?
- What would you click next?
If they hesitate on any answer, you don't have a design problem - you have a clarity problem. Design can't fix unclear messaging. It can only make unclear messaging prettier.
The uncomfortable part
Fixing this usually means cutting. Pages, paragraphs, features you're proud of. The most common edit I make on client sites isn't adding something - it's deleting three sections that were competing with the one thing that actually converts.
Your website doesn't need to say everything. It needs to say the right thing, once, clearly.
If you want an outside pair of eyes on yours, that's a conversation I have for free. Email me - I'll tell you what I see in the first five seconds, honestly.