How Your Website’s Role Just Changed Forever

Key Takeaways

• Less traffic landing on websites than two years ago. That changes what your website needs to do.
• Vibe-coded websites are fast and genuinely useful, but there’s a major problem with them.
• Home page conversions best practice for conversions based on a live review of SimpleScaling.com.

Greg Merrilees was recently interviewed by Brendan McGurgan on the ScaleX™ Insider Podcast, which ranks in the top 2% of podcasts worldwide on Apple Podcasts, to talk through why the role of a website has changed and what serious businesses need to do differently right now.

Brendan did something Greg genuinely enjoys and rarely gets: he pulled up his own website live during the conversation and asked for a score on air.

It got a 7 out of 10. Greg told him exactly why. Then they worked through the fixes.

This post captures the key ideas from that conversation. By the end, you’ll have a clear sense of where your website might be falling short and what to do about it.

Watch the full interview here…

Vibe Coding: What It Is, What It Can Do, and What It Can’t

This is the question Greg gets more than any other right now.

Vibe coding is where you type or talk to an AI tool; Claude is currently the best at this, and it designs and builds a website for you. No developer. No designer. Just a prompt and a result.

It’s real. It works. Studio1 uses it.

For specific, self-contained tools, an interactive scorecard, a macro calculator, and a lead magnet that delivers instant personalized results, Vibe Coding is genuinely excellent. It’s fast and flexible, and any business can do it today.

For replacing the main website of a serious, established business? Not yet.

Here’s the problem. Every vibe-coded website Greg has reviewed starts from a template. It customizes around your inputs. But it’s still recognisably a template. There’s nothing in it that makes you feel like this is a unique brand.

Brand perception is measurable. A high-ticket offer on a website that looks like everything else creates a mismatch. The visitor found you on social media, formed an impression of your brand, and arrived on your site expecting that impression to be confirmed. If it isn’t, if the site looks generic or AI-assembled, you lose them before they read a word.

Human creativity, human strategy, and the specific knowledge of your audience and your competitors, AI enables all of that. It doesn’t replace it. Not yet.

The rule of thumb: Use vibe coding for lead magnets, calculators, and quick-win tools. Use professional design for anything a prospect will use to judge your credibility.

Already Have a Vibe-Coded Site?

Get your vibe-coded website reviewed instantly with our free scorecard.

Any business can use it right now, for free. It’s the fastest way to get an honest read on what your site is and isn’t doing before you invest in anything else.

The Role of Your Website Has Changed Forever

Brendan asked a question Greg hears more and more: Are websites still relevant?

He mentioned he’s using ChatGPT more and Google less. When he searches through an AI tool, he rarely ends up on a website. It’s a real observation and a real shift.

The role of a website has changed. Not disappeared. Changed.

For most of the last decade, the game was SEO. Create content, rank on Google, and attract visitors from search. That’s still valuable. But it’s no longer how most people discover brands.

Today, trust gets built on social media, YouTube, podcasts, and through AI tools that summarize information without sending anyone anywhere. Your website isn’t the discovery mechanism it once was. It’s the destination people arrive at after they’ve already decided they want to know more.

The visitors arriving now are more intentional. They’ve already found you somewhere else. They’re evaluating on a deeper level. They want to confirm what they already suspect: that you’re credible, that your offer is real, that you’re worth the investment.

Less traffic. Higher intent. That’s the new reality.

And social media is rented land. The platform can change its algorithm, its terms, or its rules overnight. A social following is an asset you borrow. An email list is an asset you own. That’s why capturing email addresses still matters more than ever, even as the entry points shift.

The website is still the hub. Social, YouTube, podcasts, and AI citations are the spokes pointing back to it. The hub still matters. It just needs to work harder for the visitors it gets.

Related: Why 97% of Your Website Visitors Aren’t Ready to Buy, and What to Do About It

Live Website Critique: 7 Out of 10, Here’s Why

Brendan pulled up his website, simplescaling.com, live during the conversation and asked for an honest score. It got a 7 out of 10.

Here’s a scroll through the homepage as discussed in the episode:

What’s working? The design is genuinely distinctive. The color rationale, highlighting yellow, blue, and green, like annotating notes at a seminar, is creative and specific. The overall aesthetic signals this is not a generic business.

What’s holding it back?

Three separate color palettes across different pages. Inconsistency like that quietly undermines the professional impression the homepage creates. Visitors notice, even when they can’t say why.

An auto-play video background on the homepage. The most important element on any webpage is the copy. The video is competing with it. For first-time visitors, it’s distracting. For repeat visitors, it becomes actively annoying.

The headline, “Scale Up Coaching for Natural Born Leaders,” is directionally right. But it doesn’t tell visitors specifically who it’s for or what they’ll gain. Social proof is buried too far down. And the mega menu on hover takes up too much screen real estate and creates friction that gets in the way of reading.

Quick wins to reach an 8.

Simplify the homepage. One clear statement of who you serve and what outcome you deliver. One strong testimonial from an ideal client near the top. Three distinct pathways for different visitor types so people can immediately see which one is for them.

Then load the rest of the page with social proof. Case studies. Video testimonials. Written reviews. At a high-ticket price point, proof is the primary conversion driver.

One specific point: Brendan had a 30-question interactive scorecard buried deep in the site. That’s exactly the kind of lead magnet that should be the primary cold-traffic offer, prominently featured, not hidden three clicks from the homepage.

Not sure where your site scores? The AI Interactive Author at nextlevelwebsitedesign.com/free can walk through your specific homepage and tell you exactly what’s missing. It’s free and takes about five minutes.

The Thank-You Page Most Businesses Are Completely Ignoring

When someone books a call with you, they land on a confirmation page. Most of those pages say “your call is confirmed” and nothing else.

That’s one of the most expensive missed opportunities in any funnel.

When someone books a free call, they don’t value it much; they didn’t pay for it. Show-up rates can be as low as 30 to 50% depending on the offer. A thank-you page video changes that significantly.

Here’s the framework. Record a face-to-camera video. In it, reiterate the specific benefit they’ll get from the call. Address the objections your sales team hears most often, especially “is this just a sales pitch?” Say what the call is not. Say who it’s a great fit for. Say who should probably wait.

That combination of benefit reinforcement and objection handling, delivered before the call happens, makes the call go faster, smoother, and with a higher close rate.

One more thing: don’t send people to Calendly.com. Embed the booking widget on a page on your own domain. Keep visitors inside your ecosystem.

The same principle applies to lead magnet thank-you pages. When someone downloads your free resource, put a face-to-camera video on that page. Acknowledge what they just got. Tell them what to look out for in it. Then offer the next step. That person is the warmest they’ll ever be; use that moment.

How to Diagnose What’s Actually Wrong With Your Website

Microsoft Clarity. Free. Install it today. Click heat maps, scroll-depth maps, and video recordings of every visitor session, with AI built in to summarize the patterns for you. You find out where people are clicking on things that don’t work, where they’re dropping off, and which sections nobody reads.

Google Analytics. Should already be installed. Session duration, bounce rate, traffic sources, and behavior flow. Combined with clarity, you have both the numbers and the observation.

The AI Interactive Author. Fastest starting point. At nextlevelwebsitedesign.com/free, Greg’s entire book is uploaded as a custom GPT. Ask it what’s wrong with your homepage. Ask how to fix your lead magnet strategy. Ask why your bounce rate is high. Specific, practical answers, free.

The blog post date trick. AI tools read the date on content pages. If your posts show “date created” from three years ago, they get treated as stale. Change the displayed date to “date updated” and refresh the content periodically. Small change, meaningful impact on how often your content gets surfaced by LLMs.

Case Study: The Property Couch, Before and After

The Property Couch is an Australian property investment podcast and finance advisory business.

When they first came to Studio1, they had a podcast website that wasn’t converting. Few leads. No real growth infrastructure. About 20 people in the team.

The redesign was built around a reciprocity-first strategy. The podcast itself is the primary value delivery, backed by free guides, live workshops, and educational content that builds trust before anyone is asked for anything. Robert Cialdini’s reciprocity principle applied at scale through content.

Since that first redesign, the team has grown from 20 to 140 people. That growth led to five further website projects: the main finance business site, a property investor app called Moorr, and other brand properties in their ecosystem.

Each site has its own brand personality. All of them work together as one content and conversion ecosystem. The Moorr app is producing strong conversion numbers from its own dedicated landing page.

The lesson: a great website isn’t a one-time project. It’s the beginning of a relationship with a design partner who understands your business, your audience, and where you’re heading.

Three Timeless Principles, Whatever AI Does Next

Your website is the start line, not the finish line. Add social proof as you earn it. Update photos; nobody should see a photo of you that’s more than three or four years old. Run conversion tests. Keep improving. The site that launches is not the site that converts best six months from now.

Clarity beats clever every day of the week. If a 10-year-old can’t understand what you do and who you do it for from your homepage, your messaging has a problem. Simplify until it’s undeniably clear. The design can be sophisticated. The communication should not be.

Lead with value before you try to sell anything. Don’t sell on Hello. Give visitors something genuinely useful before you ask for their time, their email, or their money. Build trust first. The sale follows naturally when the trust is there.

Those three principles have stayed consistent across 26 years and 2,000+ websites. They’ll still be true in whatever world we’re operating in five years from now.

Where to Start Right Now

Not sure where your site is leaking revenue? Take the free Conversion Scorecard: 9 questions, 2 minutes, instant diagnosis.

Once you know your score, take it to the free AI interactive author and ask it specific questions about your weakest areas. You’ll get practical recommendations grounded in the full conversion methodology.

And if you’d like a direct conversation about what would move the needle most for your business, book a no-pressure strategy call.