How to review a landing page before you launch it

The gap between "it looks done" and "it's ready" is where launches quietly fail. Here's the pass to run — and the one check you can't do alone.

Short answer: run two reviews, in order. First a self-review against a fixed checklist (clarity, proof, the one action, mobile, speed, the unfurl) — the objective stuff you can verify yourself. Then a stranger review: put the live page in front of two or three people who've never seen it and watch what confuses them, because the one thing you cannot check yourself is whether it makes sense to someone who isn't you.

Most pre-launch "reviews" are just staring at the page again, which finds nothing — you've gone blind to it. A review that works has structure (a list you can't rationalize your way past) and an outside eye (someone with no context). Do the list first; it's free and catches the objective misses. Then spend your scarce favor — asking people to look — on the thing only they can tell you.

The pre-launch checklist

Work down it. This is the objective pass — you can verify every item without anyone's help.

The check you can't do alone

You wrote it, so you know what it means — which is exactly why you can't judge whether it lands. Put the live page in front of two or three people who've never seen it and ask one thing: "What does this do, and what would you click?" Their hesitation is your bug report. If the page was built by an AI agent, the fastest way to run this is to have the agent share the live page via an MCP tool, send the link to a few people who pin their confusion right where they feel it, and read the notes back to fix what tripped them. That's the twocents loop — the stranger review, without scheduling a single call.