UX designer here. been auditing landing pages for SaaS and ecommerce for a while.
the conversation that comes up every single time:
founder: "we need to rework the hero. it's the first thing people see."
me: "what's your bounce rate?"
founder: "around X percent."
me: "what's your bounce rate ON the hero specifically?"
silence.
most teams obsess over the hero because it's the visible part. it's what the founder shows friends on their phone. it's what a redesign agency sells you on. but in actual session recordings, the hero is rarely where people decide to leave. they leave at the offer, at the pricing, at the form, at the trust signals, at the moment they have to commit.
your hero is real estate for a one-line promise and one clear next action. that's it. the rest of the page is doing the actual conversion work.
the irony: i've shipped redesigns where we kept the hero almost identical and rebuilt everything below the fold. conversion moved. i've seen teams spend 3 weeks on a "killer hero" with no other changes. conversion didn't move.
if you're staring at a page that "doesn't convert" and you keep iterating on the hero, you're optimizing the part that matters least.
drop the URL in the comments if you want me to tell you which section is actually leaking. happy to do it in public.
curiosity question: where's the section on your landing page you suspect is the real problem but you've been avoiding fixing?