Why isn't my landing page converting?
You are getting visitors. Some are even the right visitors. Almost none sign up. Before you blame traffic, pricing, or the product, run the same seven checks we run before every teardown we publish. They are ordered by how often they turn out to be the leak, and every example below comes from a real page we tore down — most of them live SaaS companies that did not ask to be critiqued.
1. Does the headline sell the outcome, or the category?
Most heroes describe what the company is, not what changes for the reader. A category statement is fine on an about page. In a hero it answers a question nobody asked.
“The Agent Economy, Mapped.”Agentory — teardown verdict: sells a category, not a customer
Test: read only your headline and ask “what is in it for me?” If the answer requires knowing what your product does already, the headline is failing the 3-second scan. The rewrite told the buyer exactly what they get: “Get Found by the Founders Buying AI Agents.”
2. Is the subhead speaking to one reader or two?
Split-audience copy converts neither audience, because each one waits for the sentence addressed to them and leaves before it arrives. Agentory's subhead tried to serve people browsing agents and founders paying to be listed in the same breath. Pick the reader who pays, and write to them alone. If you genuinely have two audiences, that is a second page or a section further down — not the hero.
3. Does the subhead lead with mechanism instead of stakes?
Founders buy outcomes; the implementation detail belongs behind them.
“StatusFlo auto-detects Stripe outages by watching your payment webhooks — then notifies customers via email and updates a custom status page.”StatusFlo — teardown verdict: mechanism ahead of outcome
What the buyer actually fears is hearing about a failed checkout from an angry customer. That fear was invisible until the rewrite put it in the headline: “Stop Hearing About Stripe Outages From Angry Customers.” The webhooks moved into the subhead, where the mechanism earns trust instead of taking up the first scan.
4. Does a clever line hide the object?
Wordplay costs clarity precisely when readers are scanning fastest.
“Know before your customers do.”StatusFlo — know what?
A visitor scanning for 3 seconds gets no product, no problem, no stakes. Cleverness is a bonus, never the payload. If the line needs a second read, most readers will simply not give it one.
5. Does the copy open defensively?
“No motivation. No filler.” — one real page opened with what it refuses to be. Leading with a competitor's sins primes doubt before a single promise lands: the page starts by arguing instead of selling. Lead with the promise; save the contrast for readers who are already comparing you, further down the page.
6. Are you using your vocabulary or the buyer's?
“Feature request prioritization” is roadmap vocabulary. Customers say “I keep building things nobody uses.” One real feedback tool led with the first and lost the recognition that earns the click. List the words your buyers type into a search box or say on a support call; your hero should use theirs, not your product's taxonomy.
7. Does the CTA commit to something specific?
“Get Started” commits to nothing. The strongest CTAs in our teardowns name the action and the cost or the payoff: “List My AI Business — from $19”, “Get Every Playbook — $28/mo”. Hiding the price until the signup form is a small leak that compounds: visitors who would have converted bounce at the surprise, and they do not come back to tell you.
What these checks will not fix
Copy is not a rescue for the wrong offer. If visitors match your buyer description and still leave, and the seven checks come back clean, the problem is usually upstream: the page promises something the product does not yet deliver, or the product solves a problem people do not pay to solve. No headline saves that, and any guide that tells you otherwise is selling you a rewrite.
Run the checks in 20 minutes
Print your hero — headline, subhead, CTA, nothing else. Apply checks 1 through 7 in order and write one sentence each. The first check that fails is usually your biggest leak, because everything below a broken headline is read by almost nobody. To see what a finished diagnosis looks like, read one of the 22 real teardowns — each one shows the hero as it was, the three leaks found, and the rewrite.
Or skip the manual pass: paste your landing page URL into Copy Engine and get 3 conversion leaks free in about 30 seconds. The full rewrite costs $9.
Linkforge itself is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how every teardown on this site was produced and published in minutes rather than weeks.