Delete Something

There’s too much on your PDP. Delete something.

Most eCommerce sites aren’t really designed any more. They are assembled over time from familiar blocks: product images, the buy box, size information and specifications. All good stuff.

Then comes the rest. Banners, badges, countdown timers, chat bubbles, trust seals, wishlists, only three left in stock, a widget showing the weather at the office. True story. I’ve seen it.

Every one of those things was added by someone reasonable, for a reasonable reason. Together they bury the one thing the customer came for. They create noise and split the user’s focus. The page becomes loud because it satisfies the merchant’s desire to make sure nothing is left out.

The customer has access to all the information. That can only reassure them and push them towards conversion. Yes?

Well. No. Not really.

It creates a confused narrative. On a page with multiple calls to action, where should the user’s attention be? How clear is the path to completion? What are they meant to do next? A quiet page does the opposite. It holds the focus that the noisy page splits and keeps the customer’s attention on the product and the decision in front of them.

The obvious interpretation is that this is restraint. That taking things off is a kind of discipline, or an aesthetic preference for less. It isn’t. Restraint means holding back something you would rather do. There is nothing here I would rather do.

It’s confidence.

You strip the page back because you trust the product to stand on its own. The photography is good, the description is honest and the questions that matter have been answered. None of it needs a countdown timer to help it along.

A page covered in badges, seals and reassurances is a page that is worried you won’t buy. Every urgency amplifier suggests that the product alone might not be enough. The clutter is anxiety about the merchandise, and anxiety is contagious. The customer can feel a page trying too hard, even if they would struggle to explain why.

A quiet page feels confident because it knows what deserves attention. That confidence has to come from somewhere.

Good design comes from knowledge, not fear.

Knowledge means knowing what the product is, who wants it and what they need to see before they commit. Fear is what fills the gaps when nobody has done that work. If you do not know which questions matter, you answer all of them. If you do not know which objections are real, you add reassurance everywhere. If you do not know what is stopping people from buying, every banner, badge and widget starts to look useful.

The result is a page designed around everything the business is afraid might go wrong.

And the gaps get filled. Nobody in this story is stupid or malicious. Elements arrive on a page because someone asked for them and there was no test in place to say no. Marketing wants the banner. Product wants the badge. Someone senior saw a countdown timer on a competitor’s site and mentioned it in a meeting. Nobody in the room had a reason to refuse that was stronger than personal taste.

There is no test, and without a test, the loudest voice wins. The page ends up serving the person who asked loudest, rather than the person who came to buy. And the person who came to buy is not in the meeting.

So the answer is to introduce a test. An audit of page elements.

I call mine The Edit.

Open your highest-traffic page and look at it cold. Not as the person who built it, briefed it or signed it off. Look at it as someone who has never seen it before and has thirty seconds to decide whether to continue. Use a different device if it helps. Step outside your own experience. It’s all very zen.

Then take every element on the page in turn. The banner, the badge, the timer, the seal, the widget. Ask what job it is supposed to do.

1. Does it make the decision clearer?
2. Does it prove a claim you have made?
3. What behaviour, research or support data shows that it needs to be there?

An element can meet more than one of those criteria, and the strongest usually do. But it has to meet at least one.

Then ask the harder question: what behaviour, research or support data shows that it needs to be there?

Without that, all you have is a plausible story about why the element might help. Almost anything on the page can be defended that way. An element does not earn its place because someone can explain its intention. It earns its place because there is evidence that the customer needs it.

If there is no evidence, it is noise. And it goes.

Who added it does not matter. Why they added it does not matter. The audit has no opinion about any of that, which is exactly what makes it useful. Even if it was suggested by the boss, if it is not earning its place on the page, it is out. Deleted.

“I don’t like that banner” is an opinion. It invites another opinion, and the argument goes to whoever has more seniority or stamina. How many meetings get derailed by cyclical arguments about a minor point? Too many.

“That banner fails the test” is a finding. It invites a specific challenge: which of the three jobs does it do, and what evidence supports it? Now the burden has moved. The stakeholder defending the banner has to name the job it does and show why it matters. They either can or they can’t.

It replaces opinion with process.

The audit does not remove ego from the room. Mine is in there too. It makes ego irrelevant by giving everyone the same thing to argue about, which is the element itself.

Run this properly and a lot of elements fail. Some fail obviously, and everyone in the room knows it before you have finished the sentence. Others survive, but for a reason different from the one everyone assumed.

Reviews near the buy button might not create trust in some vague, general sense. They might answer a specific concern about fit, quality or delivery. A size guide might not increase conversion directly. It might reduce uncertainty and prevent returns. That distinction matters. Once you know the job an element is doing, you can judge whether it does that job well.

What remains is the result of the process. The page is quiet because everything that was not doing a job has gone.

Quiet, not empty.

The product is still there. The proof is still there. The information the customer needs is still there. You can see the narrative again, pointing towards Add to Basket.

Go delete something.