A practical look at what changes a page's performance — structure, message and speed — and what only looks like it does.

Three things move the number more than anything else, and none of them is the thing most people ask us about first.

Structure

What each page is for, and in what order the argument is made. A visitor who cannot tell within one screen whether a page is for them will leave, and no amount of motion design will hold them.

Message

The words a company uses internally are almost never the words its customers search for. The gap between those two vocabularies is, in our experience, the single largest source of wasted traffic.

Speed

Not a Lighthouse score — the time between clicking and being able to read. Those are different numbers, and only one of them is felt by a customer.

What does not move it

Carousels. Testimonial sliders nobody waits through. Illustration styles chosen because a competitor had one. Cookie banners that block the first screen. These are not neutral — several of them measurably cost you enquiries — but the reason they persist is that they are easy to decide and easy to approve.

How we measure it

Enquiries per thousand sessions, segmented by landing page and by channel. It is a blunt number and it is honest, which is more than can be said for time on page. We take a baseline before anything ships, because a redesign without a baseline is just an opinion with a launch date.