Landing Page Optimization Checklist: 15 Things to Fix Before You Spend

Most landing page optimization advice is vague. "Improve your headline." "Add social proof." "Make your CTA stand out." None of that tells you what to actually change. This checklist is different. Every item is a specific, testable criterion organized by the five dimensions that the Lytms landing page grader evaluates. If your page passes all 15 checks, it is ready for traffic.

Use this alongside the landing page scoring tool to see exactly where your page stands before fixing anything.

Headlines (Items 1-3)

Your headline is the single most impactful element on the page, and most headlines fail for the same three reasons.

Item 1: Your headline communicates a specific outcome in 8 words or fewer. Bad: "The next generation of business intelligence." Good: "See your sales pipeline in real time." The test is simple. Read the headline to someone who has never visited your site. Can they tell you what the product does? If not, rewrite it.

Item 2: Your headline names the buyer or the mechanism. "Scheduling for busy teams" names the buyer. "Branches like git for your database" names the mechanism. "The best solution for modern businesses" names neither. The more specific your headline, the higher it scores on clarity and value proposition.

Item 3: Your headline does not use internal vocabulary. Every company has words that make sense internally but mean nothing to a first-time visitor. "Supercharge your GTM motion" uses three pieces of jargon in five words. If your headline requires industry knowledge to parse, it will score below 5.0 on clarity.

CTAs (Items 4-6)

A weak CTA is one of the easiest problems to fix and one of the most common reasons pages score below 6.0.

Item 4: Your CTA uses an action verb paired with an outcome. "Get started" names an action but not an outcome. "See your score in 60 seconds" names both. "Start free" reduces perceived risk but still does not name the outcome. The strongest CTAs combine all three: action + outcome + risk reduction. "Start free — see results in 14 days."

Item 5: Your CTA appears above the fold on both desktop and mobile. On mobile at 390px viewport width, your CTA button should be visible without scrolling. If your hero image or nav bar pushes the CTA below the fold on mobile, you are losing the majority of your traffic before they see a way to act.

Item 6: Your CTA button has at least 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background. A light blue button on a white background is technically visible but not prominent. Performance marketing pages need the CTA to be the most visually dominant interactive element in the first viewport. Test this with any contrast checker tool.

Social Proof (Items 7-9)

Social proof is the dimension where most pages leave the most conversion on the table, because teams settle for generic trust signals.

Item 7: Your social proof uses named companies or specific numbers. "Trusted by leading companies" scores 3.0. "Used by 2,400 companies including Stripe, Notion, and Linear" scores 8.0. The difference is specificity. Named companies are verifiable. Specific numbers are credible. Anonymous claims are neither.

Item 8: Your social proof appears before your feature list. Visitors read roughly in order. If they see features before proof, they evaluate features skeptically. If they see proof first, they evaluate features favorably. Place your logo strip or testimonial above your feature section.

Item 9: At least one testimonial includes a specific outcome. "Great product, love using it!" is worthless. "Reduced our response time from 4 hours to 12 minutes in the first week" is worth its weight in gold. If you only have generic testimonials, ask three customers for a specific number. One concrete result outperforms ten vague endorsements.

Structure (Items 10-12)

Page structure determines what visitors see and in what order. Bad structure can sabotage good copy.

Item 10: Everything needed to decide is visible in the first viewport. This means headline, subheadline, CTA, and one proof anchor. If your hero section is a full-bleed image or an animation, it is taking space away from conversion content. On the Lytms landing page grader, above-fold completeness is one of the most predictive dimensions for conversion.

Item 11: Your page has a clear visual hierarchy with the headline as the dominant element. Nothing on the page should visually compete with the headline for initial attention. If your nav has 8 items including dropdowns, if your hero has multiple competing text blocks, or if your headline is the same size as your body copy, hierarchy is broken.

Item 12: Your page works at 390px viewport width without horizontal scroll. Pull up your page on a phone. Is the headline readable? Is the CTA full-width and tappable? Is any content cut off or overlapping? Mobile visitors make up the majority of traffic for most campaigns, and a page that looks good on desktop but breaks on mobile is effectively half a page.

Conversion Signals (Items 13-15)

Conversion signals are the elements that address the visitor's final hesitations before they click.

Item 13: Your page explicitly handles at least two objections. Every buyer has reasons not to buy. Price, complexity, switching cost, trust, timing. Your page should name and address at least two of these. "No credit card required" handles the risk objection. "Set up in under 5 minutes" handles the complexity objection. If your page never acknowledges why someone might hesitate, it scores low on objection handling.

Item 14: Your claims use specific numbers instead of superlatives. "The fastest" is unprovable. "Loads in 0.8 seconds — 5x faster than industry average" is specific and verifiable. "Best-in-class" means nothing. "97.3% uptime SLA" means something. Replace every superlative on your page with a number and watch your specificity score climb.

Item 15: Your page has a second CTA at the bottom for visitors who scroll. Not everyone converts from the hero. Visitors who scroll past your features, testimonials, and pricing are deeply interested but need one more prompt. A full-width CTA band at the bottom of the page catches these high-intent visitors. Without it, they reach the footer and bounce.

How to Use This Checklist

Run your page through the Lytms landing page grader first to see your dimensional scores. Then use this checklist to identify which specific items to fix for each dimension that scores below 7.0.

Do not try to fix all 15 at once. Start with the three items in your lowest-scoring dimension. Fix those, re-score, and move to the next dimension. Performance marketing teams working with growth teams find that fixing 4-5 items typically moves a page from the 5.0-6.0 range into the 7.0+ zone, which is the threshold for confident ad spend.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is a page that scores well enough that you can spend on traffic knowing the page itself is not the bottleneck.