Wedding photographer landing page: find the gap

The couple who finds this page is not shopping for photos yet. They want to know whether you cover their city and venue, whether you are free on their date, roughly what it costs, and how to ask. They often meet the page on a phone, from an Instagram or Pinterest link, sometimes inside that app's own browser. The first screen shows a large photo and a tagline, so none of the three answers is there. They scroll the gallery, and if the images are heavy, the page is slow to show them. The owner knows every answer, so the gap is invisible from inside.

• On a phone, can a couple find your city and travel range without scrolling past the gallery?
• Is there a date check near the top of the page, or only on the contact page?
• Is there a price range on the page, or only 'contact for pricing' with nothing after it?
• Open the link from an Instagram story on your own phone. Does the inquiry form load and submit inside that app's browser?

Start on a phone. Couples usually arrive from a search or a friend's story. The first screen is usually a full width photo with a line such as 'Timeless wedding stories.' Nothing there says where you work, whether you are free on a date, or what it costs. Gallery images are large files, so on a mobile connection the next section can sit blank. A couple who leaves in that gap never reached an answer.

The next thing they meet decides whether they stay. If the inquiry button sits under the last gallery, a couple scrolls past every photo to find a way to ask. If the button opens a form, the form decides. A form that asks for guest count, budget, full venue address, timeline and referral source asks for an essay on a phone keyboard before it says anything. That is a different failure from a slow gallery.

A couple is asking three things, in this order: do you cover our place, are you free on our date, and roughly what does this cost. Your portfolio answers a fourth question, whether your work is good, which they assume because they found you. The page often answers the fourth question loudly and the first three quietly, if at all. 'Based in the city, travel available' is easy to miss in a footer. 'Contact for pricing' with no range makes a couple guess, and a couple who guesses wrong leaves without asking.

For a couple who already has a venue, the date is the question that ends the visit: a 'Check availability' button that opens a calendar from another company can fail to load inside an in-app browser, and then there is nothing to use. A plain line with a date field that takes any date the couple types answers it without a widget.

Open your page on your own phone from an Instagram story link, so it opens in that app's browser. Scroll down without stopping, then go back to the first point where you wanted one of the three answers and could not find it. That point is the cause. If the photos arrive late, the browser's network panel shows which images are the largest. If the answers are present but the button is hard to find, the cause is placement. If the button opens a form that will not submit in that browser, the cause is the form.

Then send simulated couples through the same path. Mimiq gives each visitor a profile, a reason to be there and a task, such as finding out whether you cover their date and venue, then sending an inquiry. It records each step, where a visitor stopped, and a screenshot. Run it again after each change to see who got further. It shows whether a fix moved people through the page, not what your real traffic will do.

Landing page testing

After you fix the first screen, the inquiry path can break again with every site update. Rerun the same simulated couples after each change.Test steps behind a client login with a test account, and check each preview of a redesign before it goes live. A new source, such as a blog feature or a Pinterest campaign, brings a new kind of couple.