Giving every page one job and judging it on that alone

4 days ago
3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Introduction

Most pages on a small business website have never had a purpose assigned to them. They exist because the site needed an about page, or because somebody wrote something, or because a service required a page and one was made. Nobody can say what any individual page is supposed to achieve, which means nobody can say whether it is achieving it or what should be on it.

This is the root of several other problems. Pages accumulate elements because there is no basis for refusing any. They are judged by traffic, which measures arrival rather than usefulness. And when performance is discussed, the conversation has nowhere to start because success was never defined.

1. Giving every page one job means writing the objective down

The practical act.

One sentence per page, stored somewhere. Produce an enquiry, explain a service well enough to shortlist us, answer a question so it is not asked, capture a contact. A spreadsheet with two columns is sufficient and it takes an afternoon for a typical small site.

2. Accept that not every page converts

The important allowance.

An article's job may be to be found and read and to leave an impression. Judging it on enquiries condemns material that is doing exactly what was intended. This is the most common reason useful content gets deleted prematurely.

3. Choose the measure with the objective

The pairing.

Enquiries for a service page, time and scroll depth for an explanatory one, completion for a form. The measure follows the job rather than being applied uniformly. A single site-wide conversion rate tells you very little because it averages pages with incompatible purposes.

4. Use the objective to decide what belongs

The main benefit.

Every proposed addition gets tested against the sentence. This is the only mechanism that reliably stops pages accumulating, because it makes refusal impersonal. It also settles arguments quickly, since the criterion was agreed before the request arrived.

5. Two objectives means two pages

The structural rule.

Where a page genuinely has to sell a service and capture newsletter subscribers, it is doing both badly. Separation is cheap and each page then works. The cost of an extra page is almost nothing; the cost of a compromised one recurs on every visit.

6. Give the important pages the attention

The prioritisation.

Not every page deserves equal effort. A handful produce nearly all your enquiries, and knowing which lets you spend where it matters rather than uniformly.

7. Identify the pages with no job at all

The clean-up.

Most sites contain pages nobody can justify: an outdated news section, a page for a service you stopped offering, something written for a campaign that ended. These can be removed or redirected.

8. Review the objective when performance is discussed

The discipline.

Before changing a page, restate what it is for. A surprising number of performance problems turn out to be a page being judged against a job it was never given.

9. Keep the list short enough to maintain

The practical constraint.

One line per page in a spreadsheet. If maintaining it is a project, it will not be maintained, and an abandoned list is worse than none.

Be careful about assigning conversion objectives to pages that should build understanding. Pressing an enquiry request onto every explanatory page damages the material and rarely produces the enquiry, because the reader was not at that stage.

Conclusion

Write one sentence per page and judge it against that.

Accept that some pages exist to be read rather than to convert, pair each objective with the measure that suits it, use the sentence to decide what belongs on the page, split any page carrying two objectives, concentrate effort on the handful of pages that produce most enquiries, remove or redirect pages with no job at all, restate the objective before discussing performance, and keep the whole list to one line per page.