Your website is working harder than you thin. Just not necessarily for you.
If people are landing on your site and leaving without reaching out, it’s rarely because your offer is wrong. More often, it’s a handful of small, fixable things that are creating friction before your visitor ever gets to the good stuff.
Originally aired: December 12, 2023
This post has been updated and republished as part of rebuilding the Gratitude Geek podcast archive. Some references (offers, links, or tools) may have changed since the recording.
In episode 199 of the Gratitude Geek podcast, I sat down with AJ Davis — founder of Experiment Zone and former lead UX researcher on Google Optimize — to talk about exactly that. AJ has spent her career helping companies grow revenue by improving the experience visitors have on their websites. The good news? Most of the fixes she recommends cost nothing but a little clarity.
These seven fixes are organized from the top of your page to the bottom — tackle them in order and you’ll have a noticeably better website by the end of the week.
1. Answer Three Questions Before the Scroll
The most important real estate on your website is everything a visitor sees before they scroll. AJ calls this “above the fold,” and she says most websites fail this test without even realizing it.
Before a visitor does anything else, your homepage needs to answer three questions — without making them click, scroll, or hunt:
- What is this website about?
- Who is this website for?
- Why should I work with this person or company?
Most solopreneurs lead with their own story or their passion for the work. That’s natural — but it’s backwards. Your visitor arrived with a problem. Show them immediately that they’re in the right place.
2. Name Your Niche Like You Mean It
“If we say it’s for everyone, we miss everybody.” That’s AJ’s line, and it’s worth putting on a sticky note.
The more specific you are about who your website is for, the faster the right person self-selects in — and the wrong person self-selects out. Both are good outcomes. If your homepage says “jeans for women whose hips are wider than their shoulders,” you don’t need to explain much else. The niche feels seen, and that feeling is what makes someone stay.
You don’t need a paragraph. AJ says eight to ten words is often enough. The niche will do the work if you let it.
3. Run the Squint Test on Your Homepage
This one takes ten seconds and costs nothing.
Open your homepage, then squint at it until it blurs. What jumps out? What grabs your eye first? That thing — whatever it is — is what your visitors are actually paying attention to when they land on your page.
If your squint test reveals that a decorative photo or a background color is pulling focus away from your headline or your call to action, that’s your fix. AJ uses this with clients as a fast, no-data-required gut check before making any design changes.
4. Check Your Button Contrast (Not Just Its Color)
Everyone talks about button color. AJ is more interested in contrast.
A button that blends into the background — even if it’s a lovely shade of brand blue — is invisible to visitors who are scanning quickly. The fix isn’t always to change the color. It’s to make sure the button stands out clearly from everything around it.
A simple test: look at your call-to-action button and ask whether it would still be visible to someone glancing at your page for three seconds. If the answer is no, swap it for something with more contrast before you invest in anything else.
5. Install Microsoft Clarity (It’s Free)
You cannot fix what you cannot see. AJ recommends Microsoft Clarity as the free starting point for any solopreneur who wants to understand how real visitors are actually using their site.
Clarity is a click tracking and heat mapping tool — meaning it shows you where people click, how far they scroll, and where they drop off. You don’t need to be a data person to use it. The visual maps make it obvious pretty quickly whether people are even seeing the section of your page you spent four weeks writing.
Hotjar does similar things and has a free tier as well. Either one will show you things about your website that no amount of guessing can tell you.
6. Rethink Where Your About Page Lives
Here’s the nuance: the importance of your About page depends entirely on what you’re selling.
If you run an e-commerce shop, visitors are there for the product — not your story. AJ says About pages for product-based businesses generally shouldn’t even be in the main navigation. Instead, pull the trust signals out (your return policy, where it’s made, who made it) and put them right next to the Add to Cart button.
If you’re a service provider or consultant, your About page matters — but even then, don’t keep all the good stuff locked away on a separate page. Weave your credibility, your values, and your story throughout the site, where people are actually reading.
7. Cut Your Bullet Points in Half
This one came up almost as an aside, but it stuck with me.
AJ shared that our short-term memory maxes out at roughly seven items at a time — and that three to five is the sweet spot for anything you want someone to actually retain. If your service page has twelve bullet points listing everything you do, your visitor’s brain is going to start dropping items before they finish reading.
Go back to your homepage and your services page with fresh eyes. If any bullet point list has more than five items, cut it. Combine things, trim things, or move the overflow to a secondary page. Less on the page means more in the reader’s head.
AJ Davis is the founder of Experiment Zone, which helps growing businesses increase revenue by improving their website user experience.
Stay Groovy!
P.S. If you’ve been staring at your website wondering why it isn’t converting, that’s exactly the kind of thing we dig into inside the Gratitude Geek Lab. Come experiment with us.
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