The checklist

The landing page checklist

Fifteen things to check before you send traffic to a landing page. The first ten are structural facts with exact pass bars - a machine can verify them, and ours does. The last five are judgment calls no machine settles, each learned on a real page - Dub's, Teachable's, beehiiv's, Notion's, and once our own - with links to the published teardowns behind them. Nothing here is theory.

Part 1: The structural ten

Each of these is a measurable fact about your page as a real browser renders it. The pass bars below are the exact thresholds our free checker applies.

• 1
  Page title: 15–65 characters

  The browser tab and every search result show it. Missing means an empty result. Google displays roughly 60 characters before cutting the end off, so a longer title loses its ending exactly where you put the payoff. Under 15 characters usually means the title names the company but not what it does.

• 2
  Meta description: 50–160 characters

  Your one controlled sentence on the search results page. Without it, engines improvise a snippet from whatever page text they find. Past ~160 characters the sentence ends in an ellipsis - usually mid-claim.

• 3
  Mobile viewport tag: present

  Without <meta name="viewport">, phones render your desktop layout zoomed out and every mobile visitor squints for real. This is a one-line tag and still missing on live commercial pages we check.

• 4
  Exactly one H1, 14 words or fewer

  The H1 is the page's one main claim. Zero means nothing is marked as your message. Several means the page argues with itself. Longer than about 14 words means the promise needs a breath mid-read, which usually means it is burying its point.

• 5
  First call to action in the top third of the markup

  We measure how deep the first action-worded link or button sits as a share of the page's elements; past about 35%, visitors who never scroll never meet an ask. A page with no action-worded element at all - it happens - converts nobody by construction.

• 6
  Every image has declared width and height

  Images without dimensions make the page jump around while loading, and the visitor loses their place right as they start reading your headline. More than ~40 images on a landing page is its own warning regardless.

• 7
  External scripts: 15 or fewer

  Each external script is a network request before your page settles. Counts in the dozens are a slow first impression on any connection that is not perfect - and the first impression is the whole job of this page.

• 8
  Share image and favicon: declared

  A link without og:image unfurls as bare text on X, Slack, and LinkedIn - a free ad slot left empty every time anyone shares you. The favicon is smaller stakes, but a blank tab icon reads as unfinished.

• 9
  At least ~1,000 characters of rendered visible text

  Total up everything a visitor can actually read once the page renders. Our floor is 1,000 characters - roughly a hundred and fifty words - and it is deliberately low: Notion's famously spare landing page rendered about three thousand when we measured it, and the kind of page that fails this bar is a hero line and a footer with nothing in between. Below the floor, a stranger has nothing to be convinced by and a search engine has nothing to rank.

• 10
  Count the numbers in your opening copy

  How many numeric claims does your first screen make? Zero is a choice some excellent pages make deliberately - but you should know your count, because a page with no numbers is asking to be believed on style alone. This is the bridge item: a machine can count your claims; only a reader can judge whether the page proves them.

Part 2: The reading five

These are the items no machine settles. Each one is on this list because we found it on a real page, not in a book - where a published teardown documents it, the link goes to the evidence.

• 10
  The promise names a payoff, not a category

  "Every tool you need" promises everything and proves nothing - beehiiv's hero does exactly this while naming not one tool, on an otherwise well-built page (teardown #007). The test: could a competitor paste your headline above their product? If yes, it is a category label, not a promise.

• 11
  Proof stands next to the claim it proves

  Dub's page holds proof most founders would envy - 100,000+ customers, the CEOs of Vercel and Framer on record - and places none of it above the fold (teardown #005). Notion hides its strongest trust line below the viewport (teardown #008). Proof that arrives after the visitor has already judged the claim arrives late.

• 12
  The mobile fold is what actually loads, not what you designed

  On Teachable's mobile fold, a migration banner and a cookie dialog take the entire first screen and the headline never appears (teardown #006). beehiiv's consent panel covers roughly 40% of the phone fold and cuts a sign-up button in half (teardown #007). Load your page on a phone, first visit, cold cache, consent tools on - that screen is your real landing page for most of your traffic.

• 13
  The first screen spends its pixels on the argument

  Notion's fold spends 320 vertical pixels before the value proposition starts and clips its own product shot mid-frame (teardown #008) - on a page that scores 9–10 on proof and CTA discipline. Structure can be near-perfect while the fold budget still goes to the wrong things. Measure what a stranger sees before their first scroll, in pixels, not sections.

• 14
  Someone reads it cold before traffic does

  The maker of a page is the one person who cannot see it: you read your intentions, a stranger reads the words. We run our own checker on our own landing page precisely because of this - it once flagged a meta description we had written twenty minutes earlier as too long to survive search results. If it catches its makers, it will catch something on yours.