We scored 22 homepages on nine things.
Eight of the scores were spread out the way scores usually are. One wasn't.
Not one page scored above 3 out of 5 on what happens after the sale. Sixteen of the 22 scored a 2.
22 companies. The scale runs to 5.
Sixteen of 22 land on 2. Scores 4 and 5 are empty. Not one page in the category makes an argument worth more than a 3 about what happens after the sale.
The category was work management software. Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Basecamp, Jira, and 17 others. Tools people open every morning. Annual contracts. A business that lives or dies on renewal.
Every one of them has a homepage that ends at the credit card.
What we were looking for
The element is called Connection and the question is narrow. What does this page say about being a customer?
Not the trial. Not onboarding. The ordinary Tuesday nine months in, when the novelty is gone and the thing either fits your week or annoys you.
Most pages score a 2 because they have logos and a testimonial. That's evidence other people bought. It isn't a picture of what happens after you do.
Why the hole is there
Homepages get written to win comparisons.
That's reasonable. Most traffic shows up mid-evaluation with three tabs open, and the page has one job: make the shortlist, get the trial. So it optimizes for the ten minutes before the decision. Feature grid. Pricing. Integrations. Logos. Free trial, no card.
Then the buyer signs, the page's job is over, and nobody writes the next part.
Except the page isn't only read before the purchase.
It's read by the person defending the renewal to a CFO who wasn't in the demo. By the colleague who finds out on Monday that everything is moving. By the champion writing a Slack message to forty people. By the exec who signed the invoice and wants to know what they bought.
All of them go to your homepage. All of them find a page written for a stranger who hasn't decided.
What that costs
Your champion is unarmed. They liked the demo. Now they have to defend a line item to somebody who didn't see it. If the page never gave them a sentence about anything past week one, they'll paraphrase your feature list. Badly.
Expansion is harder than it should be. The person adding seats builds the internal case from scratch, from a site that only ever argued for the entry point.
And renewal becomes a fresh evaluation. A year later they compare you against whoever has the newest page. If your site never described what the relationship turns into, there's nothing in their head to weigh against somebody else's shiny hero.
What a 4 would look like
Nobody in the set scored one, so there's no example to point at. Here's what we'd expect to see.
The messy account. Every product page shows a clean setup screen. Almost none shows month fifteen — full, cluttered, real. A screenshot of a mature workspace says more about durability than any feature list.
The sentence for the Slack message. One line your champion can paste without editing. Write it, or they'll write a worse one.
The part that gets better. Most products have something that compounds with use. History. A model that learns the team. A workflow that speeds up. It's rarely on the homepage because it isn't a differentiator during the comparison. It's the whole argument for year two.
What happens when it goes wrong. Support, migration, how to leave. Pages skip this because it sounds like admitting failure. It reads as confidence, and for a buyer who got burned last time it's the most reassuring thing on the page.
Try it on your own page
Read your homepage as somebody who bought three months ago.
Is there one line for them?
For 22 out of 22 companies in one of the most competitive categories in software, there wasn't.
From Volume One of the Yieldpage Category Map — 25 project management homepages read against one shared axis and scored on nine elements. Read the full volume →
Also from this volume: A new headline is not a new position · Say something only you could say
Paste your URL and Yieldpage reads your homepage the way your buyer's mind does. No account, under 5 minutes.