Your product works. You have early users who love it. But your website converts at 0.8% and you can't figure out why qualified visitors leave after twelve seconds.
We've watched 2,400+ founders launch sites on Marcus. The ones who succeed past month three avoid the same seven mistakes. The ones who struggle repeat them. This isn't about design taste or brand sophistication—it's about whether a stranger understands what you sell before they scroll.
Your hero section doesn't say what the product does
The biggest killer. You have four seconds before someone decides your site isn't for them. Most founders waste those seconds on clever taglines that mean nothing to strangers.
"Building the future of work" tells me nothing. "Time tracking that doesn't need timesheets" tells me exactly what you do and why I might care. The difference is 60% of your bounce rate.
Your hero section needs three things, in this order:
- What the product is in six words or less
- Who it's for so the right people recognize themselves
- One concrete outcome they get, with a number if possible
The fix: Open a blank document. Write "We help [specific person] do [specific job] without [specific pain]." Now turn that into a headline. "Invoicing for freelancers who hate accounting software" beats "Simplify your financial workflow" every time. Test it on someone who's never heard of your product—if they can't repeat back what you do, rewrite it.
You're hiding your pricing
Founders hide pricing because they're scared. Scared it's too high, too low, too complicated, not enterprise enough. So they put a "Contact sales" button and wonder why only tire-kickers fill out the form.
Transparency builds trust. Hiding pricing builds suspicion. Someone researching solutions will open twelve tabs. The ones without visible pricing get closed first.
Marcus shows pricing on every site we make for ourselves: €29 per project per month for Builder, €290 per month for Studio. No surprises. We close 34% of people who click through to checkout because they already decided the price works before they got there.
The fix: Put your pricing on a dedicated page, linked from your header navigation. If you have genuinely complex enterprise pricing, show your starting price and a comparison table for standard tiers. "Starts at €99/month, enterprise from €990/month" works. "Book a demo to discuss pricing" doesn't. The person booking that demo has already decided you're probably too expensive.
What to do about complicated pricing
If you have usage-based pricing or genuinely variable costs, show the formula. "€0.03 per API call, €49/month minimum" is clear. A calculator that estimates their bill based on volume is even better. The goal isn't to close the sale on the pricing page—it's to keep them reading instead of leaving.
There's no social proof anywhere
You're asking strangers to trust you with their money or their data. Why would they, when you haven't shown them anyone else who did?
Social proof isn't optional. It's the difference between "this might work" and "this definitely works for people like me." Founders skip it because they don't have Fortune 500 logos yet. You don't need Fortune 500 logos. You need evidence that real humans got real value.
Three kinds of proof that work, ranked by effectiveness:
- Specific outcome testimonials: "Cut our support tickets by 40% in two weeks—Sarah Chen, CustomerX." The number and the timeline matter more than the company name.
- Volume metrics: "1,247 projects built on Marcus this month" proves adoption better than any tagline.
- Named customers with faces: A photo, name, role, and one sentence beats an anonymous quote even from a famous company.
The fix: Email your first ten customers today. Ask one question: "What specific result did you get from using [product], and how long did it take?" Offer a €50 credit for a one-sentence answer. Five will reply. Put those five quotes on your homepage under your hero section, with first name, last initial, and their role. Update them every quarter as you get better customers.
Your mobile experience is broken
68% of your traffic is on a phone. Your site was designed on a 27-inch monitor. See the problem?
Broken mobile isn't about small buttons or slow loading, though those kill you too. It's about navigation that collapses into an icon no one clicks, forms that require zooming to fill out, and text that's fourteen pixels tall. Someone lands on mobile, gets frustrated in six seconds, and you never see them again.
The fix: Open your site on your actual phone right now, not in Chrome DevTools. Try to complete your main conversion action—sign up, book a demo, whatever. Can you do it without zooming, without mis-tapping, without giving up? Time yourself. If it takes more than 30 seconds, you're losing half your mobile traffic.
The three mobile killers to check first
- Touch target size: Buttons need to be 44×44 pixels minimum, with space around them. Your "Sign up" button crammed in a header navigation doesn't count.
- Form fields: One field per row on mobile. Autofocus the first field. Use the right keyboard type (email keyboard for email, number pad for phone).
- Reading width: Paragraphs wider than 70 characters are unreadable on a phone. Break up your text or your mobile visitors will bounce.
You're not tracking what matters
Most founders install Google Analytics, glance at it twice, and never look again because the dashboard overwhelms them. Or worse—they installed the tag wrong and it's not tracking anything.
You don't need to track everything. You need to track the one metric that predicts revenue: how many people start your conversion flow versus how many finish it.
For Marcus, that's visitors who click "Start building" versus visitors who publish a live site. Our target is 12% start-to-publish. When it drops below 10%, we know something broke in the builder. When it spikes above 15%, we know a traffic source is sending qualified visitors.
The fix: Pick your one conversion goal. Set up a goal in Google Analytics (or Plausible, or Fathom—doesn't matter which tool). Track these four numbers weekly: total visitors, conversion goal starts, conversion goal completions, completion rate. Write them in a spreadsheet. When completion rate drops 20% week-over-week, investigate. When it climbs, double down on whatever you changed.
Your images are destroying page speed
You uploaded a 4.2MB screenshot straight from Photoshop. Your hero section takes seven seconds to load on 4G. Half your visitors leave before they see your headline.
Image weight is the easiest performance problem to fix and the most common one we see. Founders use high-res images because they look crisp on their MacBook. They don't realize that same image takes 12 seconds to download on a phone in a cafe.
Page speed matters more than you think. A one-second delay in load time costs you 7% of conversions. Three seconds costs you 32%. If your site takes five seconds to load, you've lost half your visitors before they see your product.
The fix: Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights right now. Look at the "Opportunities" section. If "Properly size images" or "Serve images in next-gen formats" appear, you have an image problem.
How to fix image weight in 20 minutes
- Download every image from your site.
- Run them through Squoosh.app or TinyPNG.
- Target 200KB or less per image—80KB is better.
- Re-upload the compressed versions.
- Check PageSpeed Insights again—you should see a 30-point improvement.
Marcus handles this automatically. Every image you upload gets compressed to WebP format and served at the size the visitor's device actually needs. It's not magic—it's just doing the boring work founders skip.
Your call-to-action says nothing
"Get started" is not a call to action. It's a placeholder you forgot to replace. What am I starting? How long will it take? What happens after I click?
Vague CTAs kill conversion because they create uncertainty. Uncertainty creates hesitation. Hesitation creates tab-closing. Someone ready to try your product stops because they don't know if clicking the button means entering a credit card, booking a call, or starting a two-hour setup process.
The fix: Replace every CTA button on your site with a specific action and a consequence. "Start your free project" tells me I'm starting something, it's free, and it's one project. "Book a 15-min demo—no slides" tells me exactly what I'm committing to and that you won't waste my time.
Test this on your homepage CTA. Instead of "Sign up," try "Build your first site—free for 14 days." Measure click-through rate for a week. You'll see a 20-40% improvement just from removing ambiguity.
The CTA formula that converts
Every button should answer three questions: What action am I taking? (Start, build, book, download.) What do I get? (Free trial, demo, template, guide.) What's the risk? (No credit card, 14 days free, cancel anytime.)
"Start building—no credit card needed" beats "Get started" by 35% in our A/B tests. Every single time.