Why nobody is clicking your link in bio

Nearly everything written on this question is a list of tips: better copy, better call to action, fewer links, more stories. Any of them might help. Most of them are irrelevant to your particular page, and applying them in a random order means you cannot tell which one worked.

The checks below are ordered by two things: how cheap they are to run, and how much of the problem space they eliminate. Each one tells you whether to keep going or stop.

1. Is anyone arriving? If not, nothing else matters.
2. Does the page work on a phone? Most of your traffic is on one.
3. Is the top link the thing they came for? Usually not.
4. Do the links still go somewhere? Some of them will not.
5. Is your expectation right? Sometimes nothing is wrong.

Views and clicks are separate numbers and confusing them sends people off fixing the wrong thing for weeks. A page with four views and zero clicks does not have a conversion problem. It has an audience problem, and rewriting your button text will do nothing about it.

How to tell

• Look at page views over the last 30 days, not clicks. If the number is small, stop reading and go and get traffic.
• Check where the views come from. Almost every bio page has one source doing most of the work and several doing nothing.
• If the traffic is well below your follower count, the problem is upstream: the link is not being mentioned, or the posts pointing at it are not landing.

This check finds the most embarrassing and most common failure, and it takes about a minute. Around 85% or more of bio-page traffic is on a phone, and a page is usually built and admired on a laptop.

How to tell

• Open your own page on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, having logged out. You are checking what a stranger gets, not what the owner gets.
• Scroll sideways. If the page moves horizontally at all, something is wider than the screen and the layout is broken for everyone on a small phone.
• Count the seconds until the links appear. If it is more than about three, a meaningful share of visitors left before they saw anything.
• Look at the contrast. Pale grey text on a pale background survives a bright laptop screen and disappears outdoors, which is where phones are used.

If custom styling is involved, this is where it usually goes wrong. Anything that makes the page container wider than the screen produces a page that is technically fine and practically unusable.

This is the most common real cause, and it is almost never diagnosed, because it does not look like a fault. The page works, the links work, and the thing people want is in position six.

position takes a large share of all clicks on a page

1stposition takes a large share of all clicks on a page

position and below is where buried winners hide

4thposition and below is where buried winners hide

score gap that marks a link as buried rather than unlucky

2xscore gap that marks a link as buried rather than unlucky

How to tell

Compare each link's click rate against its position. What you are looking for is a link sitting fourth or lower that converts far better than the ones above it. In our own analytics that pattern is called a buried winner, and the threshold is deliberately strict: a link has to be scoring at least twice as well as its position would predict before we will say anything, because otherwise you get told to reorder your page every time a number wobbles.

The manual fix is to drag it up. The problem with the manual fix is that it is only right until the next thing changes, which is the argument for ordering the page by behaviour rather than by hand.

Links rot quietly. A product sells out, an affiliate programme closes, an event passes, a page moves. None of these send you an email, and the link keeps sitting there accepting taps.

How to tell

• Zero clicks despite real views. A link that has been up at least two weeks, has picked up 100 or more views in four weeks, and has never once been clicked is not unlucky. Something about it is wrong: the label, the position, or the destination.
• A fading rate. A link whose click rate has fallen week on week for three weeks running, and is now below 60% of where it started, is telling you something changed. Check the destination before you rewrite the title.
• Tap every link yourself, once a month. Unglamorous, and it finds things nothing else will.

Behavioural detection catches the ones that stopped converting. It cannot catch a link that still loads but now shows a sold-out page, because that looks identical from the outside. Both kinds are worth understanding, and dead links goes through them properly.

Sometimes the honest answer is that nothing is broken and the number is normal. It is worth ruling this in before spending a month optimising.

A focused page tends to convert somewhere in the region of 3% to 10% of its visitors into a click on something. Pages with a long list of links run lower, because attention is finite and every extra option costs the ones above it. Neither number is a target, and a benchmark from a blog post is close to useless because it is measuring a different traffic mix.

What is genuinely informative is your own rate over time, and how to read it is a whole question of its own. A rate that is flat while your following grows is a real signal. A rate that is lower than a stranger's published average is not.