I don’t care about the feature list, I just want less work

This is an opinion. Just an opinion. If you don't want to hear it, come back tomorrow. More product, agency and business advice then. But this is advice I'm starting to give many of the product developers I'm talking to – specifically plugin folks in the WordPress ecosystem.

Mind you, I'm not saying you should haven't features. I'm not saying that features won't eventually come into the picture when someone is making a decision about your software.

What I'm saying is that I don't care about your features until I know that you can solve my problem.

[tweet “I don't care about your features until I know you can solve my problem.”]

So if your product's homepage is covered in features, my recommendation is going to be to move those to their own “Features” page. Make it secondary. And spend the bulk of your homepage telling me what problems you solve.

When was the last time you looked at OptinMonster?

If you visit OptinMonster, you'll see that they're doing exactly what I'm talking about. They have a “Features” link in their main navigation. But it doesn't take over their homepage.

Of course OptinMonster likes their features. They're proud of each one. But when you look at their homepage, they're not focused on features. Instead, what are they focused on?

First, they want to make sure you know how popular they are, and how many customers (and the kind of customers) they've already helped.

Then, they focus on the next most important thing they want you to know – especially if you're one of those corporate customers (like the ones above).

Their focus? How quick and easy it is to implement / use their software.

If you're a corporate customer, speed of deployment is a serious issue. It's what they focus on. And the rest of the page supports their position. In essence, they're saying, “We create a wildly popular software that is easy to deploy, and will deliver results quickly. We have an incredible reputation, support to back it up, and answers for your questions.”

All of that comes before a feature list.

When was the last time you visited Give?

You know Give, right? The folks that have built the most successful donations plugin for WordPress. Guess what you notice in their main navigation?

The like their features too. But as a prospective customer, I don't care about the feature list until I know that their solution will make it easier for me to do what I do. I want to know that they'll solve my problems.

And that's what they put on their homepage. Starting with that same social proof, and a clear animated graphic that shows me how simple it is to get going.

I could walk you thru the details of their site, but that's not the point. The point is simple:

I don't care about the feature list of plugins until I care about the plugin. And I won't care about the plugin until I have a strong sense that it can solve my problems.

Have you heard of NitroPack?

I don't know if you've ever heard of NitroPack. I just discovered them the other day.

Now, to be clear, I'm been a big fan of WP Rocket for years – as you can see in my review of all the caching plugins.

So this isn't anything about them. But when I saw NitroPack was helping more than 30k sites and I'd never heard of them, I was intrigued. So I signed up, pulled it down, and applied it to my site – while also taking a quick speed score to see how it changed things.

That's fast. It took more than a second off the time to interactive (TTI) and the fully loaded time dropped by almost 2 seconds. WOW!

I don't care about the feature list…until….

But that's not my main point. My main point is that I didn't have to do any work. I didn't have to configure a lot of settings. I want less work, not more.

Website performance is complicated. If you go to the Features page of NitroPack, you'll see a ton of features.

But I don't care about your features until you prove that your solution makes me work less.