From ‘Pretty Page’ to ‘Converting Page’: What Small Founders Miss

I still remember how proud I was of my first landing page. It was beautiful — clean design, perfectly matched colors, crisp images. I spent weeks perfecting it. Only one problem: it barely converted. Like many small founders, I fell into the ‘pretty page’ trap. Since then, I’ve learned that converting pages and pretty pages are not always the same thing.

Table of Contents

• • The Difference Between Pretty and Converting
  • Common Mistakes Small Founders Make

How to Diagnose Your Landing Page Issues

• How AI Can Optimize Your Conversions
• A Real-World Case Study
• Built with Lovable
• Frequently Asked Questions

The Difference Between Pretty and Converting

When I left my sales career in Japan to build my own products, I brought with me a deep understanding of what makes people say “yes.” Yet I still had to learn that the digital world plays by slightly different rules.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a pretty landing page is about how it looks, while a converting landing page is about how it works. The best pages balance both, but if you have to prioritize, conversion wins every time.

A converting landing page:

• Communicates the value proposition clearly and immediately
• Aligns with the visitor’s intent and mental model
• Addresses objections that prevent conversion
• Guides the visitor toward a singular, clear action
• Loads quickly and works flawlessly on all devices

Common Mistakes Small Founders Make

After analyzing hundreds of landing pages from indie and small SaaS founders, I’ve spotted several recurring issues:

Vague Value Propositions

The classic problem: “We make your business better.” Better how? Compared to what? By how much? Without specifics, visitors can’t connect your solution to their pain.

Focusing on Features Instead of Benefits

I see this constantly: pages listing all the cool technology and features without clearly connecting them to how they solve the user’s problems. Visitors don’t care about AI algorithms — they care about saving 10 hours a week.

Unclear Next Steps

So many landing pages leave the user confused about what to do next. Multiple CTAs competing for attention, unclear button text, or worst of all, no visible CTA at all without scrolling.

Too Much Text

From my days baking bread in a small shop overseas, I learned that people decide with their eyes and nose before they taste. Online, it’s similar: people scan, not read. Walls of text signal effort, and most visitors won’t invest that effort unless you’ve already convinced them they should.

Ignoring Mobile Users

It’s 2024, and I’m still seeing landing pages that look broken on mobile. Almost half of your visitors might be on mobile devices, and they’ll abandon a page that doesn’t work for them.

How to Diagnose Your Landing Page Issues

Before you can fix your landing page, you need to understand what’s broken. Here’s a simple 5-point checklist I use:

1. The 5-Second Test: Show someone your landing page for 5 seconds, then have them tell you what your product does and who it’s for. If they can’t, your headline and hero section need work.
2. The Backwards Test: Start at the bottom of your page and scroll upwards. Does your page tell a coherent story in reverse? This helps identify logical gaps in your narrative.
3. The Competition Comparison: Put your page side-by-side with a competitor. If a visitor had both pages open, why would they choose you? Is that reason immediately obvious?
4. The Hesitation Identifier: Ask several people to review your page and record where they hesitate or get confused. Patterns will emerge that point to problem areas.
5. The Analytics Dive: Review your bounce rates, time on page, and heat maps. Where are people clicking? Where are they leaving? This data is gold for identifying issues.

How AI Can Optimize Your Conversions

One of the biggest challenges for small founders is lack of time and resources. You don’t have a dedicated conversion rate optimization (CRO) team or the budget for expensive Ui/UX consultants. This is where AI tools can level the playing field.

To address this gap, I built LandingBoost, a tool that uses AI to score your landing page from 0-100 and provide actionable fixes. Here’s how AI can help:

Quick Analysis at Scale

AI can analyze your page in seconds, examining aspects like:

• Clarity and effectiveness of your value proposition
• Complexity of language and readability
• Headline effectiveness and emotional impact
• CTA placement, visibility, and clarity
• Mobile-friendliness and responsiveness
• Visual hierarchy and attention flow

Prioritized Fixes

Instead of a long list of issues, good AI tools like LandingBoost prioritize what to fix first based on the potential impact on conversions. This lets you focus on the 20% of changes that will give you 80% of the results.

Testing Alternatives

AI can quickly generate multiple versions of headlines, hero sections, and CTAs for you to test. This democratizes A/B testing, making it accessible to smaller businesses. With LandingBoost, you can quickly generate new hero sections to test against your current version.

A Real-World Case Study

One of our users, a solo SaaS founder selling a productiv ity tool, was struggling with a 1.2% conversion rate from landing page to free trial. He had spent weeks perfecting the design and thought it looked great.

After running his page through LandingBoost, three key issues were identified:

1. His value proposition was buried in paragraph three of his intro text
2. His primary CTA blended in because it used the same color scheme as the rest of the site
3. His feature list didn’t connect features to benefits

Based on LandingBoost’s recommendations, he made three changes:

• Rewrote his headline to place the value proposition front-and-center
• Changed his CTA button to a high-contrast color that stood out from the rest of the page
• Rewrote his feature list as “benefits-with-evidence” (for example, instead of “Automatic Tagging”, he wrote “Save 2 hours/week with Automatic Tagging that categorizes your work”

The results? His conversion rate increased to 3.8% — a 217% improvement with just three changes. And the best part? The page still looked just as professional and polished as before — it just converted better.

Built with Lovable

This analysis workflow and LandingBoost itself are built using Lovable, a tool I use to rapidly prototype and ship real products in public.

Built with Lovable: https://lovable.dev/invite/16MPHD8

If you like build-in-public stories around LandingBoost, you can find me on X here: @yskautomation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a landing page be both pretty and converting?

Absolutely. The best landing pages combine aesthetic appeal with conversion-focused design. The key is ensuring that your design choices enhance — rather than distract from — your core message and conversion goals. A sophisticated, beautiful design that makes your value proposition clearer and more compelling is the ideal.

How long should I spend optimizing my landing page before focusing on other aspects of my business?

This is a balance every founder must strike. A practical approach is to set a time box for your initial optimization effort (1-2 weeks), focusing on high-impact changes identified by tools like LandingBoost. Then, move to other business priorities while setting up a regular cadence (e.g., monthly) for reviewing and improving your landing page. Continuous improvement is more effective than one-time perfectionism.

What’s more important: improving my landing page or driving more traffic to it?

This is like asking whether you should fix the leaks in your bucket or add more water. Ideally, you’re doing both simultaneously, but if your conversion rate is low (below 2-3% for SaaS), focus on improving your landing page first. Driving more traffic to a poorly-converting page is expensive and inefficient. Once you’ve achieved a reasonable conversion rate, scaling traffic becomes more valuable.

How often should I run A/B tests on my landing page?

A/B testing requires sufficient traffic to yield statistically significant results. For most small founders, instead of running multiple tests simultaneously, test one important element at a time (usually your hero section or main CTA) and give it enough time to gather data. With LandingBoost, you can quickly generate alternative hero sections to test every 2-4 weeks, depending on your traffic volume.

Remember, the transformation from “pretty” to “converting” isn’t just about aesthetics — it’s about aligning your page with what your visitors truly need. With the right approach and tools, you can build a landing page that both looks good and converts well.