Iranian landing pages measured: only 17 of 85 had a form

What we measured, and how

Twelve buying-intent queries were pulled from Google in Iran: online shop design, web design company, cheap website, SEO company, logo design, app development, promo video, custom website, motion graphics, website support, corporate website and logotype. We took the organic results, one URL per domain, and reached 100 pages. Eighty five loaded fully inside the time limit.

Each page opened in headless Chromium at 1366 by 768 and we counted what is genuinely visible in that first screen: input fields, telephone links, and any button or link whose text is a call to action. This is a desktop measurement and each page was loaded once. Mobile behaves differently and we did not test it.

The phone wins, the form does not

Splitting the 85 by what was reachable without scrolling:

• 38 pages had a phone number and nothing else
• 12 had a form and nothing else
• 5 had both
• 30 had neither

Sixty five per cent carried a WhatsApp link somewhere on the page, and 22 per cent had no form anywhere at all. The picture is clear enough: this market runs on calls and messaging apps rather than on forms. That is not a mistake. Customers here really do pick up the phone.

The mistake is the thirty. A page with no form, no number and no button asks the visitor to scroll and hope. On a page that cost money and months to rank, that is the most expensive error available.

The most common button above the fold is not a button

Across the visible calls to action, "contact us" appeared on 34 of the 85 pages. Next came "request a consultation" on seven and "free consultation" on four.

"Contact us" is almost always a navigation item, not an offer. The difference between it and "free consultation" is not tone; one tells you where to go, the other tells you what you get. A page whose only invitation is the name of another page has not really invited anyone.

The median count of calls to action in the first screen was one. So this market's problem is not button clutter. Most of these pages ask for exactly one thing. The one thing is usually the wrong thing.

Median page height: fourteen and a half screens

The median document height was 11,192 pixels. On a 768 pixel window that is about 14.6 screens of scrolling. Forty of the 85 ran past fifteen screens and twenty went beyond 20,000 pixels.

A landing page fifteen screens tall is a brochure. That is the real line between a landing page and a service page: the service page has to explain everything because its reader is researching, while the landing page has to close one decision because its reader arrived from a specific ad or a specific search. Ask one page to do both and it usually does neither.

Weight, and where it actually hurts

Median transfer was 920 KB, which is respectable for a sales page. The ninetieth percentile was 3.1 MB and the heaviest page came in at 26.7 MB. The median page pulled 13 script files and the ninetieth percentile pulled 45.

One figure stands out above all of those: only 22 of the 85 set width and height on every image. The rest are generating layout shift, and layout shift on a page with a single button means people click where a button used to be. It is the only item on this list that damages both the three page experience numbers and conversion at the same time.

Twenty nine pages had a time to first byte above 800 milliseconds and eleven took longer than four seconds to finish loading. When the traffic arriving at these pages is paid, part of that budget is spent on waiting. Shaving load time on a landing page, unlike on a blog post, converts directly into money.

So what does a good one look like

From this data, and from the pages we build ourselves:

• One specific offer in the first screen, phrased with a verb that says what happens next. "Get a price" beats "contact us" because the reader knows what they receive.
• Phone and form, both, above the fold. Do not drop the number here. Do not drop the form either, because nobody calls at eleven at night.
• A short form. Every extra field is another reason to abandon it.
• Controlled height. Past five or six screens you are probably writing a service page.
• Dimensions on every image.

And one that rarely makes these lists: the number you publish has to be answered. Our measurement stops at the browser, but on real projects we have repeatedly found the page was fine and the calls were going unanswered.

Where a landing page is the wrong tool

If your traffic arrives from informational searches, this is not the format. Someone typing "what is motion graphics" does not want a form; they want their answer first. Landing pages belong to buying-intent traffic: paid clicks, an SMS campaign, a link in a bio, or queries carrying the words price and order.

We build these as part of corporate and shop website projects, and the order we recommend is one page for the most profitable service, then measurement, then the rest. Building ten at once means ten untested guesses. If you are earlier than that, the order a web project runs in lays out the sequence, and a marketing plan decides whether any traffic reaches the page at all.

Common questions

What is a landing page?

A page built for one action, fed by one traffic source. Unlike a service page it is not meant to introduce the whole business; it is meant to make a single decision easy.

How is it different from a home page?

A home page serves someone who does not yet know what they want and must show every route. A landing page serves someone who does know, and every extra route raises the chance they leave.

Can I build a landing page for free?

Free tools exist. Traffic and testing do not come free. A page no buying-intent visitor ever sees returns nothing, whatever it cost to make.

Is a shop landing page the same as a product page?

No. A product page has to carry the full specification and be findable in search. A shop landing page is usually one offer, a bundle or a deadline, and its job is to shorten the route to payment.