The Seven Doors
Every visitor walks the same corridor. Seven doors sit between the click and the enquiry — and most sites leak at exactly one of them. Find yours, and you almost certainly don't need a redesign.
This is the reference version. The full argument, with the evidence and the teardowns, is in the article.
- 01
Are these even the right people?
Not a broken page. Your visitors came to learn, not to hire. That is a Growth problem — no page on earth converts a reader who never intended to buy.
Check: Search Console → top 20 queries. How many sound like a shopper, not a student?
- 02
They landed. Do they stay?
The page replied to their specific question with a slogan. Rewrite the opening: what you do, who it is for, what to do next — in the words they typed.
Check: The five-second test. Show a stranger the page for five seconds, then ask: did it answer you?
- 03
Can one site answer everyone?
Not on one page, and you should stop trying. One question, one page. Your homepage answers exactly one question: am I in the right place?
Check: The five questions people ask you most on the phone. Those are your next five pages.
- 04
Do they believe you?
Stock photos are invisible — eyetracking shows people skip them entirely. Put the face and name of whoever they would actually deal with, and one real piece of work.
Check: Does your About page name a person, or hide behind "our team of dedicated professionals"?
- 05
Can they act?
The deciding does not happen at the top of the page. Put a way to reply wherever belief happens — not only in the menu and the footer.
Check: Four random screenshots on your phone. In how many could a stranger contact you without scrolling?
- 06
Will they finish your form?
Every field is a tax paid in patience. Three fields: name, one way to reach them, what they need. Everything else you can ask in the reply.
Check: Count the boxes. Expedia deleted one optional field and it was reportedly worth ~$12m a year.
- 07
Did you answer them?
Same-day replies are the cheapest advantage available. An auto-confirmation inside 60 seconds puts you ahead of most of your industry.
Check: RevenueHero submitted enquiries to 1,000 companies. 635 never replied at all.
The one rule that prevents all seven
Look at what actually went wrong at each door. The slogan that wanted to sound impressive. The homepage that wanted to list everything. The form that wanted to qualify them before they'd said hello.
Every leak is the same mistake in a different coat: something on the page had its own agenda, and the visitor's question came second.
So before you build any page, write down the one question it exists to answer.If you can't name that question, don't build the page.
I fix these for a living.
Doors 2 to 6 are Convert. Door 1 is Get found. Door 7 is Off your plate. Most sites need days of work, not a redesign.