The Friction Index: The 12 Ways Landing Pages Lose Buyers

Conversion friction comes in twelve recognisable types, and almost every landing page that underperforms is losing buyers to some combination of them. They fall into five families: comprehension friction, credibility friction, commercial friction, adoption friction, and action friction. Naming them matters because an unnamed problem gets described as “the page just isn’t converting”, which is not something anyone can fix on a Tuesday afternoon.

This is the Friction Index: the taxonomy Buyer Clone’s agents use when they read a page. It exists so that a conversion problem can be pointed at rather than gestured towards. Every type below has a definition, a description of what it looks like in the wild, an attention cost, and a fix.

Friction as an attention cost

The index rests on a simple model. A buyer arrives at your page with a finite budget of patience. Confusion, unsupported claims and unanswered questions draw that budget down. Specifics, evidence and clarity refill it. Conversion happens when a buyer reaches your call to action with budget remaining. A bounce is what it looks like when the budget runs out first.

This is why friction has to be ranked rather than listed. Two problems are never equally expensive. Friction above the fold is charged to every reader who arrives; friction in a footer FAQ is only ever paid by the small number who got that far. It also explains why the same page converts one buyer type and loses another: a technical evaluator burns attention on adjectives and recovers it on specifications, while a commercially-oriented buyer does close to the reverse.

Some types compound. Price opacity plus a gated tier is not two problems, it is one wall.

The 12 types at a glance

#	Friction type	Family	The buyer’s unspoken reaction
1	Category ambiguity	Comprehension	”What even is this?“
2	Value opacity	Comprehension	”Sure, but what does it do for me?“
3	Unproven superlative	Credibility	”Says who?“
4	Proof mismatch	Credibility	”None of these people are me.”
5	Missing metric	Credibility	”Better by how much?“
6	Price opacity	Commercial	”Why won’t they tell me?“
7	Price-anchoring failure	Commercial	”Is that a lot?“
8	Gated tier	Commercial	”The one I need means a sales call.”
9	Implementation opacity	Adoption	”What am I signing myself up for?“
10	Verification gap	Adoption	”I can’t check any of this.”
11	CTA hesitation	Action	”That’s a big step for what I know so far.”
12	Commitment cliff	Action	”There’s no smaller way in.”

Family one: comprehension friction

Everything downstream depends on this family. A buyer who hasn’t understood what you sell cannot evaluate whether it’s worth the money, so comprehension friction blocks the rest of the page from doing any work at all.

1. Category ambiguity

The reader cannot tell what kind of thing this is within the first screen.

On the page: a headline built from outcome language with no object. “Ship faster. Stress less.” Beautiful, and it could be a project management tool, a CI platform, a staffing agency or a meditation app. Category ambiguity is common on pages that have been iterated many times by people who all already know what the product is.

Attention cost: the highest of any type, because it is charged to every single visitor at the moment their patience is at its most fragile. A buyer who cannot place your category has no framework to interpret anything that follows, so the rest of the page is read at a discount if it is read at all.

The fix: put the category noun in the first screen. Not in the meta description, not in the nav, in the headline or the line directly beneath it. “Pre-launch conversion testing for landing pages” costs you nothing in elegance and removes the most expensive friction on the page.

2. Value opacity

The benefit is asserted rather than made legible. Adjectives are standing where specifics belong.

On the page: “Powerful analytics that give you unprecedented visibility into your data.” Every word is doing rhetorical work and none of it is doing informational work. A reader finishes the sentence knowing exactly what they knew before it.

Attention cost: high, and it is a slow drain rather than a sharp one. Each empty sentence costs a little patience, and the effect accumulates until the reader concludes there is nothing here to learn and starts skimming. Skimming is the state in which your proof section stops being read.

The fix: replace each adjective with the thing that earned it. “Powerful” becomes the specific capability. “Unprecedented visibility” becomes the actual view the buyer gets. A useful test: if a competitor could paste your sentence onto their page without it becoming false, the sentence is not carrying value.

Family two: credibility friction

This family covers the gap between what you claim and what a sceptical reader will accept. It is where most pages that are otherwise clear quietly lose the room.

3. Unproven superlative

A strong claim arrives with no evidence attached to it.

On the page: “the fastest”, “the most accurate”, “the leading platform”, “the only tool that”. The claim itself is not the problem. Standing alone is the problem, because a superlative with nothing behind it reads as marketing noise to anyone who has read three competitor pages that morning.

Attention cost: moderate on its own, severe in aggregate. One unsupported superlative is forgivable. Three in a row shifts the reader from evaluating your product to evaluating your honesty, and that is a much harder position to convert from.

The fix: attach or retract. Either put the evidence directly beside the claim — a benchmark, a named source, a specific comparison — or downgrade the claim to something you can support. A modest claim that holds up outperforms a bold one that doesn’t.

4. Proof mismatch

Social proof exists, but it comes from a different world than the buyer’s.

On the page: an enterprise buyer reading testimonials from solo founders. A healthcare CTO reading logos from e-commerce brands. A UK team reading case studies denominated in US regulatory context. The proof is real and it is doing nothing, because the reader’s first question about any testimonial is whether the person giving it had their problem.

Attention cost: moderate, with a nasty secondary effect. Mismatched proof doesn’t just fail to reassure, it actively signals “this product is for someone else”, which converts a warm reader into a cold one.

The fix: segment the proof, or lead with the proof closest to your primary buyer. If you genuinely lack proof from a segment you’re targeting, say what you do have plainly rather than hoping adjacent proof will transfer. It rarely does.

5. Missing metric

Testimonials and claims are present but carry no numbers.

On the page: “This tool changed how our team works.” A lovely thing for a customer to say and a weak thing for a stranger to read. Same with claims: “significantly reduces onboarding time” is a metric with the metric removed.

Attention cost: moderate. Numberless proof passes over an analytical reader without registering, which means for that buyer type your entire proof section costs attention and refills none. For less analytical buyers the cost is lower, which is why this type is easy to under-rate if you only read your page as yourself.

The fix: go back to the customers who gave you the quotes and ask for the number. “Cut our onboarding from three weeks to four days” does work that no amount of enthusiasm can. Where you have no number, at least supply a specific: the task, the frequency, the before and after.

Family three: commercial friction

Three distinct failures that are frequently collapsed into “the pricing page is bad”. They have different causes and different fixes.

6. Price opacity

There is no pricing signal anywhere on the page.

On the page: no numbers, no range, no starting-from, no link to a pricing page. Sometimes deliberate, on the theory that value should be established first. In practice, the buyer’s attention has already been diverted to hunting for the number, and everything they read while hunting is read badly.

Attention cost: high, and it varies sharply by buyer disposition. A high-trust buyer in a high-trust market may shrug and read on. A cautious buyer, or one from a market with a lower baseline of institutional trust, treats hidden pricing as a signal about how the rest of the relationship will go. For that reader it is often a hard exit.

The fix: give a signal even if you cannot give a price. A starting-from figure, a range, a typical deal size, or an explicit sentence about how pricing is structured. The goal is to stop the reader searching so they can resume reading.

7. Price-anchoring failure

A price is shown, but the page gives the reader nothing to judge it against.

On the page: a single number floating on a card. $149 per month. The reader has no idea whether that is cheap, expensive or absurd, because nothing on the page establishes what the alternative costs — whether that alternative is a competitor, an agency, a contractor, or the status quo of doing it manually.

Attention cost: moderate, and easily mistaken for price resistance. The buyer isn’t rejecting the price. They are unable to evaluate it, and an unevaluable price defaults to “probably too much”.

The fix: anchor deliberately. Show the tiers together so they frame each other, state what the number replaces, or express the price against a unit the buyer already prices in their head. On our own pricing we do this by publishing what a credit buys: one credit is one agent through one page, so $19 a month on Starter converts into a countable quantity of work rather than an abstract subscription.

8. Gated tier

The plan this particular buyer needs sits behind “contact sales”.

On the page: three transparent tiers and a fourth marked Enterprise with a button instead of a price. Fine, unless the buyer reading is the enterprise one, in which case the entire pricing section they were sent to evaluate is blank for them specifically.

Attention cost: high for the affected segment, zero for everyone else, which is what makes it easy to miss. Your self-review passes because you read the page as your most common buyer. The segment being blocked never tells you, they just leave.

The fix: if you must gate, give the gated tier the most information you can — a starting band, what changes at that level, what the sales conversation will actually cover, and how long it takes. A gate the buyer can see through costs far less attention than a wall.

Family four: adoption friction

The buyer has understood, believed and accepted the price. Now they are trying to work out what happens on Monday.

9. Implementation opacity

It is unclear what adopting this actually involves.

On the page: plenty about outcomes, nothing about the path. No mention of setup, migration, who needs to be involved, how long it takes, or what breaks in the meantime. The buyer is being asked to estimate a project with no inputs, and cautious buyers resolve that estimate pessimistically.

Attention cost: high late in the page, which is expensive because it strikes readers who have already spent most of their budget getting there. Losing a buyer at the implementation question means you paid the full attention cost of the page and collected nothing.

The fix: state the shape of adoption in concrete terms. What is installed, what is configured, who is required, how long before first value. Where the answer is genuinely “nothing”, say so directly. Buyer Clone needs no snippet and no tracking code, which is worth one plain sentence rather than being left for the reader to infer.

10. Verification gap

A technical buyer cannot check the claims for themselves.

On the page: no documentation link, no API reference, no security or data-handling detail, no changelog, no architecture explanation. Marketing copy that a technical evaluator has no way to validate against anything. This buyer’s habit is to leave the page to verify, and a page that gives them nowhere to go loses them permanently.

Attention cost: severe for technical evaluators, negligible for everyone else. In a B2B purchase where the technical evaluator holds a veto, that concentration is the problem: one blocked reader in the room can end the deal regardless of how the other five felt.

The fix: link out to the material that lets them verify. Docs, security page, integration list, status page. It does not need to sit in the main flow of the page. It needs to exist and be findable, because the act of finding it is itself a trust signal.

Family five: action friction

Both types in this family describe the same underlying error from different angles: a mismatch between the size of the ask and the trust the page has earned.

11. CTA hesitation

The next step is too large for the trust built so far.

On the page: “Book a 45-minute demo” placed directly under the hero, before a single claim has been substantiated. Or a signup form asking for company size, role and phone number in exchange for something the buyer isn’t yet sure they want. The button is clear, visible and well designed. It is simply asking for more than it has earned.

Attention cost: moderate to high depending on placement. An oversized ask early in the page also damages everything after it, because the reader now understands what you want and reads the remainder as a pitch rather than as information.

The fix: match the ask to the position. Early CTAs should be small. Put the largest ask after the proof, not before it. And check that whatever sits immediately above the button is the thing that answers the last objection, since that is the copy the buyer is holding when they decide.

12. Commitment cliff

There is exactly one action available, and it is a large one.

On the page: every button on the page says “Request a demo”. No trial, no free tier, no sample output, no pricing to browse, no documentation to read. A buyer who is interested but not ready has nowhere to put that interest, so they leave with the intention of returning and then don’t.

Attention cost: this one doesn’t drain attention so much as waste the attention already spent. The buyer read the whole page, formed a positive view, and found no step small enough to take. The full cost of the page was paid and nothing was collected.

The fix: build a lower step. A free tier, a live sample, a public demo, an interactive preview, documentation that can be read without an account. We publish a full sample report for exactly this reason: a buyer who isn’t ready to sign up can still see what the product produces, and the smaller step is the one most people take first.

On frequency: what we are not publishing

The obvious next question is which of these twelve appears most often on real pages. We are not going to answer it yet, because we have not measured it.

A frequency table would be the most quotable thing in this article, and inventing one would take about ten minutes. Plenty of conversion content is built that way. We would rather publish a taxonomy that is useful and a frequency study that is true than ship both at once and have only one of them survive scrutiny.

The study is in progress: a structured pass across public SaaS landing pages, scored against these twelve types with a documented method, so the numbers can be checked rather than merely cited. When it publishes, it will include the sample size, the selection criteria and the scoring protocol. Until then, this article contains no percentages, and that absence is deliberate.

What the index does not cover

The Friction Index is a taxonomy of structural friction — problems in what the page says, proves, prices and asks for. It has real boundaries.

It does not model aesthetic response, brand affinity, or the particular emotional texture of trust. It does not measure exact price sensitivity: type 7 tells you a price has nothing to judge it against, which is a different and more tractable finding than knowing whether $49 outperforms $59. It says nothing about traffic quality, and a page can be free of all twelve types while failing because the wrong people are arriving. And it cannot tell you whether the market wants your offer, only whether your page explains it well.

Once you have traffic, real user research and behavioural data will tell you things this taxonomy never can. The index is built for the window before that, which is covered in full in the pre-launch conversion testing guide.

Frequently asked questions

What are the types of conversion friction?

There are twelve in the Friction Index, grouped into five families: comprehension friction (category ambiguity, value opacity), credibility friction (unproven superlative, proof mismatch, missing metric), commercial friction (price opacity, price-anchoring failure, gated tier), adoption friction (implementation opacity, verification gap), and action friction (CTA hesitation, commitment cliff). Each one describes a specific way a page spends a buyer’s attention without returning anything for it.

What is the most damaging type of conversion friction?

Category ambiguity, because it is charged to every visitor within the first screen and it blocks the rest of the page from working. A reader who cannot tell what kind of product this is has no framework for evaluating your proof, your price or your call to action. Comprehension failures always outrank credibility and pricing failures in priority order.

How do I find conversion friction on my own landing page?

Score the page against the twelve types deliberately, one at a time, reading as your hardest buyer rather than your most enthusiastic one. Self-review reliably catches the structural types and reliably misses the comprehension ones, because you cannot unsee your own product. A synthetic buyer panel runs the same taxonomy across several buyer types in under ten minutes, and you can see the output format on the sample report.

How common is each type of friction?

We do not publish frequency figures, because we have not measured them yet. A study across public SaaS landing pages is in progress and will be published with its sample size, selection criteria and scoring method attached. We would rather leave the number blank than invent one.

Is conversion friction the same as usability friction?

No. Usability friction covers slow loads, awkward forms and broken interactions, and it is measurable with standard tooling. The Friction Index covers interpretive friction: the gap between what your page says and what a specific buyer needs to hear. A page can score perfectly on usability and still lose most of its readers to value opacity or proof mismatch.