A landing page has about four seconds to explain itself. We built our review process around that number.
Four seconds
That's roughly how long a first-time visitor gives a landing page before deciding whether to read or leave. It isn't a design metric. It's a comprehension metric. Can they say what you do, in their own words, in four seconds.
Most pages fail this not because they're ugly, but because they're clever. The headline is a promise about feelings when it should be a sentence about function.
The test we run
We show the top of the page to six people for four seconds, hide it, and ask them to describe the company. If three of them can't, the headline goes back to the whiteboard. No amount of visual polish survives that test.
Most pages fail not because they're ugly, but because they're clever.
Waylon Wilsey
The four-second test in a review. Placeholder image at 1440 by 810.