Remove all links leading away from your landing page, and conversions could increase by 20–100%. That may sound drastic, but those are the kinds of results reported in A/B tests by HubSpot, VWO and Unbounce.
The problem is that many companies send paid traffic to their homepage and expect enquiries. Then they wonder why people are clicking and the budget is disappearing, but hardly anyone gets in touch.
I have spent more than 17 years working in UI/UX and studying how people respond to different website interfaces. “Why do we need a separate landing page when we already have a website?” is one of the questions business owners ask me most often. There are several concrete reasons. Let’s work through them.
Two Tools, Two Different Questions
A homepage answers the question “Who are you?” Someone might arrive looking for a particular service, comparing you with competitors or simply trying to decide whether they can trust you. Each of them needs a way to explore the site, so it makes sense for a homepage to include:
- Several calls to action, or CTAs, for different needs.
- Navigation to other sections.
- Case studies, reviews and company information.
- A blog and contact details.
A typical structure: Hero → Services → Case Studies → Why Us → Reviews → About Us → FAQ → Contact.
A landing page has just one job: get the visitor to take a specific action. For example, “Request a consultation.” Everything else—the About Us page, the full list of services, the blog, the team—is removed because it distracts from that single goal.
A typical structure: Hero → Benefits → How It Works → Pricing → Reviews → FAQ → Form.
More Choices Mean Fewer Enquiries
The principle is straightforward: the more things you give someone to do, the more likely they are to move away from submitting an enquiry. Their attention is limited. Chances are, they already have five to eight tabs open with similar offers and are comparing them quickly.
A homepage offers plenty of choices: menus, services, blog posts, case studies, contact information, social media links and different buttons. That is normal for a homepage. Its job is to help people understand the company.
A landing page has a different purpose: guide the visitor towards one specific action. Ideally, everything on the page should lead to the same outcome—submit an enquiry, book a consultation, download a file or buy a product.
In UX, this is called the attention ratio: the ratio of clickable elements to the main conversion goal. The closer it is to 1:1, the less the page divides the visitor’s attention.
Unbounce, one of the best-known platforms for testing and analysing landing page performance, found the same pattern in its own data: pages with a single link had an average conversion rate of around 13.8%, with conversion rates falling steadily as the number of links increased.
Individual tests tell a similar story:
- HubSpot removed navigation from five landing pages and saw conversion increases of 16–28% on pages aimed at visitors in the middle of the funnel.
- AmeriFirst recorded a 30–40% increase after removing its navigation bar.
- Yuppiechef doubled conversions, from 3% to 6%, on its wedding registry sign-up form.
- Career Point College saw a 336% increase after removing navigation and redesigning its form.
The mechanism is simple: fewer choices mean less cognitive load and a greater chance of completing the intended action. That is why paid traffic is almost always better directed to a carefully designed landing page than a homepage. On a homepage, the attention ratio usually runs into double or triple figures—Shopify’s, for example, is around 50:1.
Why Modern Homepages Increasingly Look Like Landing Pages
The distinction used to be explained too neatly: a homepage introduces the company; a landing page encourages one specific action. That division no longer fully reflects how websites work.
Look at the homepages of Stripe, Linear, Notion or Framer. Above the fold, they have almost everything we expect from a good landing page: a clear offer, a brief explanation of its value, a prominent call to action and very few distractions.
The difference is that a homepage retains its navigation. People who want to explore the product or service can look at pricing, case studies, documentation, the team or anything else that helps them decide. But the opening section still works like a landing page: it quickly explains what you can get here and what to do next.
The practical formula looks like this:
Homepage = Landing Page + Navigation
A modern homepage often follows this structure: Hero → What We Do → Social Proof → Benefits → Case Studies → FAQ → CTA. Essentially, it is a landing page with a menu, rather than a directory of links to 20 different sections.
This is also where companies often go wrong. They try to fit 10–15 equally prominent calls to action onto the homepage: “Get in touch,” “Download our presentation,” “Subscribe to the blog,” “View our work”—all competing for attention above the fold. The result is scattered attention and a homepage that does none of its jobs particularly well.
A Landing Page Does Not Have to Be Long
A good landing page for a product with a clear value proposition can be as simple as: Hero → Three Key Benefits → Reviews → CTA. That is enough. Oli Gardner himself, after analysing thousands of landing pages in Unbounce’s database, specifically noted that the data does not show long pages converting better than short ones. Length should depend on how much someone needs to consider before making a decision, rather than a desire to “show everything we can do.”
This is where agencies and designers regularly overdo it. They add sections to make the page feel more substantial: another slider, another team section, a few more partner logos. Each addition creates another point where someone’s attention can drift away from the enquiry form.
When You Need a Separate Landing Page—and When a Homepage Is Enough
A dedicated landing page makes sense when you have a specific traffic source, a clear offer and a visitor who already knows what they are looking for. Take a Google Ads campaign targeting the search “apply for an NIE in Spain online.” That person does not need About Us, property services, team profiles or a blog. They need an answer to their question and one CTA. So you create a dedicated page, such as /nie-spain, for that search.
A homepage is enough when:
- Visitors already know your brand, arrive through retargeting or visit the site directly.
- Someone comes through a recommendation but does not yet know the company.
- The traffic comes from organic search without a narrowly defined query.
In these cases, the homepage should answer three questions within five to ten seconds: what exactly do you do, who are you and why should someone trust you?
How I Put This Structure into Practice
We used this approach on a project for a legal firm helping people relocate to Spain and secure their residency status. The homepage addressed the broad need: “We help you move to Spain and handle the paperwork.” It included navigation to every service, case studies and information that built trust in the firm.
Each common search then had its own dedicated landing page: /nie-spain, /digital-nomad-visa, /golden-visa, /buy-property-spain, /beckham-law and /family-reunification. Every page focused on one search query and one CTA, with no links to other services, no blog and no main navigation.
When we split the general Services page into six landing pages targeting specific searches, the cost per lead from advertising fell and the paid-traffic conversion rate increased severalfold. It was the same mechanism seen in the HubSpot and VWO examples: the number of competing actions dropped from around a dozen to one.
Why I Do Not Always Remove Every Link
The research seems unanimous: remove navigation from landing pages, without exception. In more than 17 years of practice, I have found that advice only partly holds true.
The difference depends on where the customer is in the funnel. In those same HubSpot tests, removing navigation from top-of-funnel pages—aimed at cold traffic and first-time visitors—produced gains of just 0–4%. Mid-funnel pages saw increases of 16–28%. For expensive services that take time to consider, such as legal services, healthcare or B2B contracts worth several thousand euros or more, I sometimes deliberately keep a route back to the main site: a linked logo, or even the full header menu. This moves the page away from the ideal 1:1 ratio. But for people who are not ready to decide after seeing the first screen, being able to check “Are you a real company?” can build more trust than a landing page with no way to reach the main website. It is worth including this version in a test, particularly when the service is expensive and people need time to decide.
How to Check a Page Before Running Ads
The next time someone proposes building a landing page or improving your homepage, ask three questions:
- Where exactly will the traffic come from: ads targeting a specific search, organic search or people who already know the brand?
- What action should someone take on this page?
- How many other clickable elements are on the page, and why is each one there?
If the agency or designer cannot give a clear answer to the third question, the page was probably designed around a template rather than your business goal.
That is why I start website projects with architecture. First, I work through the traffic sources, the user journey and the main action each page needs to encourage. Then come the structure, copy and design.
This makes it clear what the business actually needs: a homepage, a dedicated landing page, a series of pages for paid campaigns or the whole combination. The result is a website that looks good and, more importantly, serves a specific purpose: an enquiry, a consultation, a registration or a sale.
Mark Vi
Tech UI/UX Expert with over 15 years of experience
