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Free guide
The Comprehensive Hero Design Guide for SMB Sites
The hero is the 5-second contract with the visitor. Get 4 dimensions right (audience match, single offer, 5-second clarity, page speed) and conversion moves. Get them wrong and the rest of the site does not matter.
Heroes are not designed in a vacuum. They are a 5-second contract with a visitor who will not give you a 6th second. This Guide is the 4-dimension diagnostic we run on every paid Activation Audit and the framework we use when SMBs ask us to rebuild a hero. Short by design. Heroes should be too.
What’s inside
- The 4-dimension scoring framework: audience match, single offer, 5-second clarity, page speed. Run it on your hero in 15 minutes.
- Audience match: the exclusion test. Naming who you are NOT for. Worked example: a $4M residential plumbing company that named its exclusion personas and tripled phone conversion.
- Single offer: the choice-paralysis rule. One CTA above the fold converts 15 to 30% better than two — same button, same words, just cut the second one.
- 5-second clarity: the script for running the test with 5 strangers, on a phone, on a Saturday morning, for $25 in coffee.
- Page speed: the only Lighthouse number that moves conversion is LCP. Under 2.5s on mobile. Everything else is a tiebreaker.
- The rewrite framework + 4 hero archetypes that work for SMBs. With copy templates.
Frequently asked
How is this different from generic hero design advice?
Generic hero advice gives you 50 things to tweak. This Guide gives you 4 dimensions to score, in order of impact, with the test for each. Audience match is the #1 lever, page speed is the #4 — most SMB heroes fail on #1 and try to fix #4. The rest is just tooling.
Can I really diagnose a hero in 15 minutes?
Yes — the scoring is fast. The rewrite is not. A 15-minute diagnostic tells you which of the 4 dimensions you're failing. The fix takes anywhere from a 30-minute copy edit to a 2-week rebuild, depending on the diagnosis.
Should I run this before or after I redesign my hero?
Before. The cost of running this guide first is 15 minutes. The cost of skipping it is — based on our caseload — usually about $12K and 6 weeks of rework when the redesigned hero fails the 5-second test anyway.
I have a designer / agency working on this. Should I share the Guide with them?
Yes, please. Most SMB founders disagree with their designer not because the designer is wrong, but because they don't share a scoring rubric. This Guide gives both of you the same 4 dimensions to score against. The disagreement turns from taste-based to score-based, and the work gets shipped faster.
What if my homepage isn't a typical hero (e.g., SaaS dashboard, e-commerce category page)?
The 4 dimensions still apply. Audience match, single offer, 5-second clarity, page speed are layout-agnostic. The Guide includes 4 hero archetype templates — one of them will fit your pattern.
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Stop reading. Ship something.
The Audit beats the checklist.
This template covers the hero layer. The Activation Audit walks all four Activation Stack layers and lands a prioritized fix list in your inbox within 72 hours.
