What Every Founder’s Website Should Have (But Usually Doesn’t)

Founder websites tend to fail in a particular way. They are not ugly, and they are rarely broken. They are simply written from the inside out — the story of the company, the values, the journey — while the person reading is trying to answer two much duller questions: what do you sell, and is it for someone like me?

What follows is the list of what is usually missing. None of it is exotic. That is rather the point.

Lead with what you sell, not who you are

The first screen of a founder’s site is the most valuable space the business owns and often the least specific thing on it. “Transforming how businesses grow” gives a visitor nothing to act on. “We build and run paid search for B2B software companies in the UK” tells them, in one line, whether to keep reading.

There is a reason to be blunt about it. Writing in 2011, Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group drew on a Microsoft analysis of more than 205,000 page visits and concluded that users often leave a page within 10-20 seconds, and that holding someone for several minutes means communicating your value proposition within about 10 seconds. The mechanism is scepticism rather than a short attention span: people are deciding whether the page is worth any of their time at all.

So the opening has to carry the load. In practice that means a headline naming the thing you sell, a sentence naming who it is for, and a line explaining how it works or what it costs. The founding story, the values and the manifesto earn their place further down, once the reader has a reason to care.

• What you sell, in the words a customer would use rather than the words your industry uses
• Who it is for, stated narrowly enough that some people rule themselves out
• What happens next, and what it costs them to find out

The four things founders leave off

Strip away the design debate and the same four gaps appear again and again. They are all cheap to close and none of them requires a rebuild.

The price signal is the one founders resist hardest and the one that repays fastest. Withholding it does not widen the funnel. It fills the funnel with people who were never going to buy, and quietly loses the ones who assumed you were out of reach.

The technical floor, and why budget does not clear it

Speed is not a vanity metric, and the strongest number available on it is a large one. In Milliseconds Make Millions, research commissioned by Google and carried out by 55 and Deloitte across 37 brands, a 0.1 second improvement in mobile site speed moved 3.2% more shoppers from a product listing to a product page and 9.1% more from that page to the basket. Retail consumers spent 9.2% more, and travel bookings rose 10%. That is retail and travel mobile data rather than a universal law, but a tenth of a second is a very small piece of engineering to buy that kind of movement.

Accessibility is the other half of the floor, and here the evidence cuts against the assumption that a well-funded site is a well-built one. The WebAIM Million survey in 2026 found detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of the top one million home pages, averaging 56.1 errors per page — and those are the largest, best-resourced sites on the web. Automated tools catch only part of the problem, so treat that as a floor rather than a ceiling. Spending more has plainly not solved this. Asking for it explicitly, in writing, before the build starts, might.

Then there is the device question, where the standard advice has quietly gone out of date. StatCounter Global Stats put mobile at 49.36% of global web traffic in August 2026, desktop at 49.11% and tablets at 1.54%. Mobile-first was a corrective to a desktop-only industry; treated as doctrine it now obscures the fact that roughly half your visitors are on a large screen with a mouse. For a founder selling considered, high-value services, that half is frequently the buying half. Build for both, and check your own analytics rather than the industry’s.

Trust signals a founder can actually supply

Most advice on trust signals assumes you already have the awards. Early-stage businesses rarely do, and the substitutes are better than they look — provided they are specific.

The rule is that a sceptical reader should be able to verify something. A named client can be looked up. A photograph of your studio can be matched against the address in the footer. A figure a client agreed to be quoted on can be asked about. Anything a visitor cannot check does not count as proof, however confidently it is presented.

Cut the copy nobody reads

Long pages are usually the symptom of an unmade decision. Rather than choose what matters, the site says everything and leaves the reader to sort it out.

They will not. Analysing 45,237 page views in 2008, Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group concluded that on the average page users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit, and that 20% is the more realistic figure. That study is old and predates the modern mobile web, but nothing since has suggested people read more than they used to.

So write for the fifth of the words that get read. Put the conclusion in the heading rather than the closing paragraph. Delete the section that restates the section above it — every site has one. And treat each “learn more” link as an admission that the page did not say the thing it was there to say.

A sensible order to do this in

Very little of this needs a redesign, and doing it in the wrong order wastes the effort. Fix the message before paying anyone to make the message prettier.

None of this is glamorous work, which is exactly why it is still outstanding on so many otherwise good websites. Founders who do it tend to find the site stops being a brochure they are quietly embarrassed by and starts behaving like the first conversation with a customer, which is all it was ever meant to be.