Build six pages, each with one job: home, use case, pricing, about, sign-up, legal. Put the one message from your strategy at the top of the home page, show the product, prove what you can, and make the action one tap away. Then let channel tests tell you which page to build next.
A launch site is a test instrument. If visitors from a channel test do not convert, the site is one of the two suspects, so build it to be changed quickly and measured plainly.
What a startup site is for in year one
In the first year the website has one job: turn the visitors a channel test sends into sign-ups, demos or orders, and tell you that it did so. Our startups page describes it as a fast site that turns the few visitors you have into sign-ups, demos or orders. Every design choice follows from that: a clear message, a real view of the product, proof, one action, speed on a phone, and tracking that counts the result by source.
That also decides what to leave out. A startup does not need a features tour for every capability, a careers page, a press page, a resources hub or a blog with no posts. Each of those is a page a buyer might land on and leave, and a week the founders did not spend on the product or the channel.
The six pages, and what each must contain
Six pages, each with one job:
- Home. The one-sentence message from your strategy, for one group of buyers, in the first screen; a real screenshot or a short silent clip of the product doing the job; proof you can show (early customers with permission, a founder's credentials, a number from your own data you can stand behind); three jobs the product does, each linking to a use-case page; and the primary action, repeated at the bottom.
- Use case. One page per first-buyer use case, one or two at launch, written in the buyer's words: the problem, the workflow shown step by step in the product, who it is for, and the action. These are the pages your ads and outreach send people to.
- Pricing. Every plan with its price, billing period and what is included, in a table a phone can show; the pricing unit explained with an example; what happens when the trial ends; and the action on every plan. If pricing is not settled, a page that explains how pricing will work and offers a conversation beats a blank “contact us”.
- About. The founders by name, with photos, why they built this and what they did before. Early buyers are betting on people; show them.
- Sign-up or booking. The fewest fields that let someone start, usually an email and a password or a single sign-on button, with what happens next said plainly. For a sales-led product, a booking page with a calendar and a promised reply time.
- Privacy and terms. Required in the USA and Canada, read by procurement and by careful buyers, and the place where your data handling is stated plainly. Have them reviewed.
The home page in detail
The first screen answers three questions in order: what is this, is it for me, and what does it look like. The message answers the first two; the product view answers the third. Resist the abstract illustration; a real screenshot with the key screen visible, or a ten-second captioned clip, does more. The primary button says what happens (“Start free”, “Book a demo”, “Get early access”) and is the only button in the first screen.
Below the first screen, in order: three jobs the product does with a link each; proof; how it works in three steps; pricing in brief with a link; the founders in a line with a link; the primary button again. Keep the home page a map of the site rather than a copy of it, and keep it true: no logos you do not have permission to show, no numbers you cannot stand behind, no “trusted by thousands” before there are thousands.
Landing pages for channel tests
Each channel test sends traffic to a page built for it: the use-case page that matches the ad or the message in the outreach, with the same words at the top that the visitor just clicked on. Google's Quality Score help explains that landing page experience, how relevant and useful the page is to the person who clicked, is one of the three components of the diagnostic, alongside ad relevance and expected click-through rate, so a mismatched page costs money as well as conversions. Our landing pages built for tests page covers how we build these with the tracking in place, and our guide to growth marketing for startups covers the tests they serve.
Speed and mobile from day one
A startup cannot afford to lose the few visitors it pays for to a slow page. Google's Core Web Vitals set the targets for a good experience: a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. According to web.dev, LCP marks when the largest image, text block or video in view has rendered, and the targets should be met at the 75th percentile of page loads across mobile and desktop.
Startup sites miss these for predictable reasons: a heavy template, an animation library, a hero video, product screenshots at full size, and analytics and chat scripts loaded before the content. Choose a light template or build small, size every image for the screen, drop auto-playing video from the top, load scripts after the content, and test the home, use-case and pricing pages on a phone before launch and after every change.
Search basics that cost nothing to get right
Google's SEO starter guide is plain about the basics: pages the crawler can read as plain HTML, a unique and descriptive title and a meta description for each page, descriptive alt text on images, links between related pages, and no duplicate content under several addresses. A six-page startup site can meet all of them in an afternoon, and should, because the use-case pages are also the pages that will rank for the first buyers' problem once the content program starts. Name each page by the problem it answers in the buyer's words, and link the use cases from the home page and from each other.
Tracking: the site must tell you what it did
Before launch, install analytics that count visitors by source, events for each action (sign-up started, sign-up completed, demo booked, plan started), and a way to join a paying customer back to the channel that brought them. Test it with a real sign-up and check the numbers before the first channel test starts. A site that converts and cannot say so is a site that cannot be improved, and the budget guide's rules all depend on this count. Keep the consent banner accurate and the privacy page in step with what the tracking does.
How the site grows
The site grows when a test asks for it. A channel that passes earns a dedicated landing page or a second use-case page. A buyer question that keeps coming up earns a page that answers it. The content program adds one substantial piece a month from the start, in the first buyers' words. A comparison page appears when buyers start comparing you to a named rival; an integrations page when the first integration ships; a customer story when a customer agrees to tell it. What the site never needs is a page built because a competitor has one. Our guide to SaaS website design describes where a software company's site ends up after that growth, and our product screen design page covers the screens themselves as the product matures.
If you want it built for you
PromotEdge International is an international strategy, technology, marketing and design company, and our delivery team is in India. Our landing page design and UI and UX design pages cover the launch pages and the product screens, and our marketing for startups page explains how we work with founders who have no marketing hire yet. The money behind the build and the tests is in our guide to the startup marketing budget.
Facts we rely on: see our company facts for what we state about ourselves and where each fact comes from.