The Pre-Traffic Landing Page Checklist

Before traffic is sent to a landing page, check seven things: the page matches the ad's promise in words, numbers and images; it has one job and one primary action; the first screen on a phone states the offer, the terms and the action; the form or buy path works end to end, tested by a real submission; the page loads fast enough in field terms; tracking records the visit and the conversion correctly; and one human who did not build the page has read it cold and can say what it offers. Any failure stops the launch. Campaigns are expensive teachers; this checklist is the cheap one.

Open the ad and the page together. Headline idea shared? Offer terms identical - the discount, the threshold, the dates? Lead visual recognisable as the same product and offer? Then the focus count: how many distinct actions does the page ask for, and is the campaign's action the visually dominant one? Check the page also stands alone for the visitor who arrives from a forwarded link with no ad seen: the offer must be intelligible without the campaign's context, because a share of traffic always arrives that way.

On a mid-range phone, on mobile data or throttled wifi: does the first screen show offer, terms line and action without scrolling? Does the cookie banner or popup cover any of the three - and if a popup exists, does it wait until the visitor has seen the offer? Then complete the page's action yourself: fill the form or reach the payment step with a real product, including making one deliberate mistake to read the error messages. Count the fields and taps; if the count surprises you, it will ambush your visitors at scale.

Run the page through PageSpeed Insights: is there field data, and what do LCP and CLS say; if no field data, does the lab result on the mobile profile keep the main content under the good threshold with the page's real scripts loaded? Then verify the plumbing: the visit is recorded in analytics with the campaign tags intact, the conversion event fires on the thank-you or confirmation (test order or test submission proves it), and the numbers land in the same tool the baseline lives in. A campaign whose conversions are not recorded is a bonfire: it produces heat, no light, and a false verdict on the page.

Give the page to one person who has not seen it - staff from another department, a friend in the trade, anyone outside the build - with one instruction: tell me what this page offers and what you would do next. Their paraphrase is the page's true headline. If they describe a different offer, or hesitate on the action, the page is not ready regardless of how the checklist scored elsewhere. Log the paraphrase next to the campaign entry; repeat reads over time are a small archive of how your pages sound to strangers.

After launch, the checklist hands over to a watch: in the first days, confirm real visits are landing (volume within expectation of the send or spend), the conversion event counts real actions, and recordings show visitors reaching the offer rather than bouncing off a defect nobody predicted. Most launch defects declare themselves in the first handful of sessions. Catching one on day one costs a pause; catching it at the monthly review costs the campaign. Schedule the watch when you schedule the launch, and the checklist becomes a habit with a memory.

The checklist fails in organisations - including one-person ones - when it is advice rather than a gate. Tie it to the money: the campaign does not launch, the email does not send, until the boxes are ticked in the campaign's log entry. This sounds bureaucratic and is in fact liberating: it replaces launch-day anxiety with a procedure, and it makes post-campaign analysis possible because the entry records the page's state at launch. Twenty minutes, seven checks, one cold read. The campaigns that skip it are the ones the monthly review cannot explain.