10 Things Your Website Should Do Before You Spend Another Dollar on Ads
Paying for traffic to a site that doesn't convert is just buying a bigger leak.
By Lance Wagner · Published · Last Updated
What should my website do before I run ads?
Before you buy traffic, your site should say what you do in five seconds, load in under three seconds on a phone, offer one obvious next step, show real proof, address pricing, and track which pages produce leads. Everything else can wait.
Traffic makes a good site better and a bad site more expensive. Ten things to fix first.
1Say what you do in five seconds
What you do, who it's for, where you do it. In the headline, not in a paragraph.
Show it to someone who doesn't know your business and ask them what you sell. Their answer is your headline's grade.
2Load fast on a phone
Most of your traffic is mobile and most of your load time is images.
Compress everything, drop the carousel, and test on a real phone on cell service.
3Give one obvious next step
Call, book, or get a quote. Pick one per page and make it impossible to miss.
Three competing buttons is the same as none.
4Make the phone tappable
In a phone-driven business, a phone number you can't tap is a form of friction you're paying for.
5Shorten the form
Every field you add is a chance to lose someone. Name, phone, and one question that helps you triage.
You can ask the rest once they're talking to you.
6Show real proof
Reviews, photos of your work, names and faces. Not stock imagery of a handshake.
Pull live reviews onto the page so it stays current without anyone remembering to update it.
7Address pricing
Silence on price doesn't make price go away. It sends people to the competitor who answered.
A range, a starting point, or an explanation of what drives cost all work.
8Give every service its own page
A bullet list can't rank and can't sell. A real page does both.
This is also what makes your ads land somewhere relevant.
9Make location and hours obvious
Address, service area, hours, and whether you come to them. Footer and contact page, minimum.
10Track what converts
Form submissions, calls, bookings, tied to the page they came from.
Without this you'll be optimizing on opinion for as long as you run ads.
The short version
- Clarity and speed beat design polish every time.
- Cut form fields before you raise budgets.
- Address price or lose the price shopper silently.
- Set up conversion tracking before the first ad runs.
Questions people ask
- How fast should my website load?
- Under three seconds on a phone on cell service. Beyond that you lose people before the page finishes drawing.
- How many fields should a contact form have?
- As few as you can live with. Three or four is usually enough to start a conversation, and every extra field costs you submissions.
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