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One clear call to action beats five clever ones

CM Christopher McGrath · 4 min read
Cover image for “One clear call to action beats five clever ones”

Look at most small-business homepages and you'll find a visitor drowning in options: call us, email us, book now, follow us, download the brochure, read the blog, join the list. Every one of those is a decision, and decisions are where people stall.

The pages that actually turn visitors into customers tend to do the opposite. They decide, on the visitor's behalf, what the single most useful next step is, and they make that step impossible to miss.

Focusing the page

Getting to one clear action usually means some hard editing:

  • Pick the one thing. What do you most want a visitor to do? Everything else is secondary by definition.
  • Make it obvious. One prominent button, repeated as they scroll, beats five competing links.
  • Remove the rivals. Every extra option you add makes the important one harder to see.

A confused visitor doesn't pick carefully. A confused visitor leaves.

The counterintuitive result

It feels risky to strip choices away, as though you're hiding things people might want. In practice, a focused page nearly always outperforms a busy one. When the next step is obvious, more people take it, and that's the entire job of the page.

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