---
title: Why Most Landing Pages Don't Convert
summary: The three fatal flaws that sink landing pages and the single-goal discipline that fixes them.
est_minutes: 5
sort: 1
---

Most landing pages fail not because the product is bad or the price is wrong.

They fail because the page was built to look complete rather than built to convert.

This is the distinction that drives everything in this course.

Understanding why pages fail is the prerequisite to building one that actually works.

**The Three Fatal Flaws**

There are three fatal flaws in most landing pages. Every page that underperforms has at least one.

Flaw one. The page has no single goal.

Most landing pages try to do too many things at once. They inform and sell and build brand and capture leads all in one scroll. When a page has five goals it has no goal. Visitors arrive, move around the page without a clear direction, and leave without doing anything. Confusion is the conversion killer that never shows up in the analytics.

Flaw two. The page does not match the traffic source.

Someone clicks an ad that says "Free Guide to Doubling Your Leads" and lands on a homepage about your company. The message match is broken. The visitor expected to arrive somewhere specific and arrived somewhere generic. They leave. Not because they were not interested. Because the experience felt like a misdirection.

Flaw three. The page does not earn trust fast enough.

Visitors arrive skeptical. They do not know you. They do not know if your claims are real. They are making a split-second calculation about whether to keep reading or leave. A page that does not address the trust gap in the first screen loses them before they get to the offer.

**What A Converting Page Actually Does**

A landing page that converts does three things and only three things.

It stops the right visitor. It holds their attention long enough to make the case. And it gives them one clear action to take.

That is the entire job. Not to impress. Not to explain everything about your business. Not to win a design award. To get one type of person to take one specific action.

Every decision about the page, what to include, how long to make it, what image to use, what the button says, should be filtered through that single standard: does this help the right person take the right action?

> The test: if someone landed on your page and had to describe in one sentence what they are supposed to do, could they? If not, the page has a goal problem.

**The Single-Goal Principle**

Every high-converting landing page is organized around one primary action.

Not a primary and a secondary. One.

That action is usually one of four things. Book a call. Start a trial. Download a resource. Make a purchase.

The discipline of choosing one is harder than it sounds. Every instinct pushes toward adding more. More context. More offers. More ways to engage. Each addition dilutes the primary action and reduces the probability that the visitor does anything at all.

This module's worksheet walks you through a landing page audit. The audit surfaces which of the three flaws is most present in your current page or most likely to affect the page you are about to build.

**Your Action Step**

Download the Module 01 Landing Page Audit below. Complete all three parts before moving to Module 02. The audit is the diagnostic. Module 02 gives you the framework to fix what the audit finds.
