What 212 pricing pages taught us

Pricing pages are the most edited pages on Starter sites. Teams change a plan name, add a feature line, move a price, and change it back two weeks later. Over the summer we read 212 of them, with permission, alongside each company’s trial sign-up rate. Here is what held up.

1. Three plans, one of them obvious

Pages with three plans and one clearly highlighted had the highest sign-up rate. Four plans did a little worse; five did noticeably worse. The highlight matters less for its color than for its position: the middle plan, lifted a few pixels and outlined, was the one most often chosen.

2. The yearly switch shows the saving in dollars

“Save 17%” asks the visitor to do arithmetic. “$290 a year, two months free” does not. The pages that showed the yearly price as a real number, with the monthly equivalent in small type underneath, kept more visitors on the yearly option.

3. Every plan says who it is for

A one-line description under each plan name, written as a person rather than a feature list, outperformed pages without one. “Real client work: your own domains, more sites, and someone to answer the phone” tells an agency which plan it is. “Advanced features” tells nobody anything.

4. The feature list is short, and the table is optional

The plan cards that converted best listed five lines or fewer, starting with “Everything in Free”. The full comparison sat below, in a table of no more than eight rows, for the visitors who wanted it. Pages that put a forty-row table first lost people before they reached a button.

5. The FAQ answers the money questions

The best pricing FAQs answered four things: can I try it first, what happens when I upgrade or downgrade, can I leave with my data, and what support do I get. Pages that answered these in two sentences each saw fewer “quick question” emails to sales.

6. One button label per plan

Buttons that named the plan (“Upgrade to Pro”) did better than ones that repeated “Get started” three times. It is a small thing, but it confirms the choice at the moment of making it.

7. A way out for the big customer

Almost every page that sold to larger teams had a quiet line under the plans for anyone who needed more: a security review, an invoice instead of a card, a contract. A text link to talk to sales was enough. It did not need its own plan.

What did not matter

A few things we expected to matter did not show up in the numbers at all: whether prices sat above or below the plan name, whether the page used cards or columns, and whether there was a money-back guarantee badge. Visitors read the plan, the price and the first three lines of the list. Everything else was decoration.

Using this on your own page

Starter’s pricing section already follows most of these: three plans from a collection, one marked as featured, a yearly switch that rewrites the prices, and a note line under each. If you change only one thing this week, rewrite the description under each plan so it names a kind of customer. It is the cheapest change on the list and one of the most effective.