How simplifying our homepage helped increase trial signups by 84% | Plausible Analytics

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&larr; All posts How simplifying our homepage helped increase trial signups by 84%<br>May 12, 2026 • Written by Marko Saric<br>April 2026 was our best month ever. We added more new paying subscribers than in any other month in our seven-year history. For three months running, from February through April, we set new all-time records for both trial signups and new paying customers.<br>We didn’t launch a new feature. We didn’t run any paid ads. We didn’t get a viral blog post or a lucky mention on Hacker News. What happened was much less dramatic than that. In late January, we spent a few days editing our homepage.<br>We moved some sections around, cut some text and changed the button labels. We expected it to help a little but we didn’t expect it to have this kind of impact.<br>Here’s what we changed and what the data showed.<br>What was wrong with our homepage<br>Our homepage had been roughly the same for a long time. It was working well enough. We were growing steadily with it. But when we looked at it with fresh eyes in January, we realized we were making visitors work too hard to understand what Plausible does.<br>The homepage still matters a lot for us. From January through April, it was the biggest entry point for non-logged-in visitors, accounting for roughly 43% of entrances. So even small improvements there can affect a large part of the signup journey.<br>The page opened with our hero section and a screenshot of the dashboard. That part was fine. But right after that, visitors landed on a wall of text. Six subsections of long-form prose about our features, our philosophy, our approach to team sharing and enterprise plans. Hundreds of words before you reached the scannable feature grid.<br>The feature grid, the part where you can quickly see what Plausible actually does, was buried below all that text. Then came testimonials, then pricing.<br>If you wanted to quickly figure out whether Plausible was worth trying, you had to scroll through an essay first. That’s not how people browse the web. People scan. They jump around and make snap judgments.<br>We also looked at our call-to-action buttons. They said “Get started” and “Live demo.” Generic and vague.<br>The changes we made<br>Most of the changes were live by the end of January, with a few smaller edits following in early February. You can see them all in our website repo. None of them involved a designer, a new layout or any visual changes. The colors, fonts, images and components are the same as before.<br>Here’s what we did:<br>Flipped the page structure<br>This was the biggest change. We moved the feature grid up so it appears right after the hero section, before any long-form text.<br>The old order was: hero, long prose (six sections), feature grid, testimonials, pricing.<br>The new order is: hero, feature grid, testimonials, shorter prose (three sections), pricing.

Now a visitor can scan our eight key features within seconds of scrolling down. No reading required to understand what we do.<br>Changed the CTA wording<br>“Get started” became “Start free trial.” “Live demo” became “View live demo.”<br>“Get started” is probably the most overused button label on the web. It tells you nothing about what happens when you click. Will it cost money? Is this a demo, a signup or a purchase? “Start free trial” answers the important part: this is a trial, not a commitment.<br>It looked like a tiny copy change, but it changed what the button promised.<br>Cut the prose in half<br>The old page had six subsections of text: simple analytics, lightweight script, privacy and GDPR, goals and revenue tracking, team sharing and dashboard sharing, and a smooth transition from Google Analytics. Plus a paragraph about enterprise plans.<br>We cut it down to three: simple analytics, lightweight script and privacy. These are our strongest differentiators and the things people care about most when evaluating Plausible as their Google Analytics alternative.<br>We didn’t remove all the prose. Plausible is not just a list of features, and we still want the homepage to explain why we exist. Our philosophy around privacy, simplicity and independence is a big part of what has kept us differentiated in the analytics market.<br>The change was not to hide that story. It was to stop making every visitor read it before they could quickly understand the product.<br>The removed sections were either already covered by the feature grid above or only relevant to a small subset of visitors. Less text between understanding the product and seeing the pricing means fewer...