How to make sure your landing page doesn’t fail before design even begins
Every time we talk about landing pages, the conversation tends to drift toward visuals, layouts, trends, and whatever is currently fashionable in design. Teams debate illustrations, animations, or “hero” images. But after years of watching real users interact with real products, I’ve become convinced that a landing page succeeds or fails long before the designer opens Figma. What determines the outcome is not the layout, the color palette, or the hero image, but the clarity of meaning. And the industry data mirrors this experience. Nearly two-thirds of marketers say their landing pages convert at under 10%, even though most of these pages look polished, modern, and technically “correct.” If design alone were the deciding factor, we wouldn’t see such consistently low performance across so many well-designed pages.
The same pattern shows up beyond landing pages. 49% of B2B marketers named content marketing as their most effective revenue channel. When almost half the industry credits revenue growth not to aesthetics but to the substance of what they communicate, it reinforces a simple truth: users act when the message makes sense to them. Meaning is what creates trust, relevance, and momentum. Content, not design, is the true interface.
This may sound self-evident, yet it is the part teams most consistently overlook. Throughout my career, building a UX research SaaS platform used by more than a hundred enterprise clients — from global retail brands to international banks — I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself: the product team assumes clarity, while the user brings none of their context with them. The internal narrative collapses the moment it meets real human interpretation.
One of the most painful gaps between product teams and users is the illusion of understanding. When you live inside a product for months, you assume the logic is obvious and the messaging is clear. But users read differently. They anchor meaning through their own experience, not yours. The number of things they misinterpret always surprises teams (though it stopped surprising me long ago). Years of conducting usability studies, “5-second tests,” and first-click research have shown me that even the simplest message can be derailed by a single unvalidated assumption.
Not long ago, we tested a financial landing page with a large rocket illustration on the first screen as a visual metaphor for growth, ambition, forward movement. That was the intention of the team. The intention of the users, however, did not exist, because half of them thought it was a burning candle. The rest simply couldn’t tell what they were looking at and ignored it. When your key emotional anchor is mistaken for a funeral accessory, you have a content problem, not a design problem.
In another study, we measured how many people understood the core value proposition within the first ten seconds. The team expected near-total comprehension. The actual result was closer to a quarter, a number I’ve seen many times, even inside complex enterprise services. When I worked with clients who operated in strictly regulated environments, such as banking or insurance, the misunderstandings were even more dramatic simply because the terminology was never validated against real user cognition.
We also tend to forget that text is the oldest interface humans have ever used. The first computer interfaces were purely textual. Books, letters, instructions are all interfaces designed to transmit knowledge. Somehow, as digital visuals became more sophisticated, content slid into the background and was treated as something to “fill the space.” But on a landing page, text is still the primary medium through which the user understands your product. If meaning isn’t clear, nothing else matters.
This becomes painfully visible when you look at how real people move through a page. The classic AIDA model still describes this journey quite well. The moment the user lands, they make a near-instant judgment: Do I understand what this is? Should I stay? I’ve spent years improving conversion rates for e-commerce, telecom, travel, and entertainment businesses, and the first drop-off always happens at the point of comprehension, not aesthetics.
If they do stay, they begin to scroll, searching for clarity, reassurance, or a compelling value. But many pages bury this information under vague phrases, internal terminology, or marketing fluff that could mean anything. When readers don’t understand something, they don’t ask for clarification; they simply leave. At the moment when a user is ready to consider the offer seriously, you’d expect the content to dissolve doubts. Instead, it often creates new ones. Critical details are hidden inside footnotes, legal PDFs, or overly complex tables. And even when the user reaches the final step, they are frequently left confused about what happens next. They submit a form and receive a curt “Thank you,” yet no indication of when someone will call, how communication will proceed, or what the next stage actually is. Uncertainty is enough to break the conversion. I’ve watched it happen in industries as different as cybersecurity and retail; the mechanism of failure is always the same.
What makes this even more ironic is that testing content is one of the simplest research activities a team can run. In my own practice building a UX research platform, where year-to-year revenue grew 90–110% and churn stayed below 5% precisely because we validated meaning, not just UI, we always began with a simple exercise: give the user a few seconds on the first screen and ask what they saw. The brutal honesty of that moment has reshaped more landing pages than any visual redesign ever could.
Testing content is surprisingly straightforward, and yet it’s usually neglected. The first thing we do is simply let people look at the first screen for a few seconds and then ask them to explain what they saw. It’s a brutally honest moment because it shows whether your carefully crafted message actually exists in the reader’s mind. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Then we allow them to explore the page for a little longer and ask again what they understood. At this stage, new misunderstandings surface, not because the users are inattentive, but because the structure of meaning isn’t aligned with how they think.
The most revealing part of this work is the collection of open-ended answers. When users explain their impressions in their own words, you see exactly where the page succeeds and where it collapses. Today we can process these qualitative answers with neural networks, which makes the work faster, but the insights remain deeply human. These responses show you how the product lives in the user’s head, and why your conversion is either growing or sinking.
Some results were almost comical. I once saw a financial landing page double its conversion after nothing but narrative and structure changes. A major insurance product saw people fail to distinguish between its own tariff plans until the explanation was rewritten. Even a small detail in an NVIDIA banner once caused people to interpret a promotion incorrectly because a tiny visual element introduced unintended meaning. In every case, the issue wasn’t the layout but the narrative.
This isn’t new. Years ago, when I worked on a landing page for a window installation business, we saw enormous results simply by reframing content around the customer’s actual context. In that case, women choose windows for a child’s room. When the content aligned with the mental world of the user, the conversion soared. The same happened in a completely different industry, a dating service, where even a simple, intuitive image of “what the user dreams of” could dramatically outperform everything else. These successes weren’t miracles; they were evidence of one principle: content that speaks the user’s language always wins.
And yet, despite all the evidence, many companies still hesitate to test content. Product managers may advocate for research, but senior leadership often doesn’t see the need. Executives glance at a page, believe they understand it, and assume everyone else does too. They forget they’re not the target user and that their level of knowledge distorts perception. Without research, teams end up launching endless A/B tests, hoping randomness will bring insight that a single conversation with users could have provided.
A landing page is not a design challenge. It’s a comprehension challenge. It’s about whether a person who knows nothing about your product can understand enough (quickly enough) to stay, explore, trust, and act. If the meaning isn’t working, the conversion never will.
And this is where prevention lies. Test meaning early. Validate the narrative before the visuals. Ask real people what they see, what they understand, and what they expect next. Clarity is not a matter of taste; it is a matter of evidence.
As someone who has spent more than a decade building products and leading UX research across complex industries, I can say this with confidence: content is the interface. The sooner teams accept it, the sooner they can stop guessing and start building landing pages that succeed. Not because they look good, but thanks to the fact that users finally understand what they’re being offered.
This is what I advise.