Does your main call to action go where its label promises?

A button is a promise. “Book a free assessment” promises a booking form; “Download the guide” promises a file; “Start your trial” promises a trial, not a pricing page. When the destination is something else, the visitor who clicked at the moment of highest intent is asked to find their way — and many do not. This week: check every promise on the page that matters most, on a phone, and fix the ones that are not kept.

The problem

Destinations drift. A booking page is retired and its link is pointed at the generic contact page “for now”. A campaign landing page is cloned from another and keeps the other's button. A redirect is added during a redesign and the button now lands on the homepage. None of these produce an error. The click works; the promise is broken; the analytics show a drop nobody can explain.

Prerequisites

• The one page on your site that most needs to convert — a landing page, the homepage, a service page.
• A phone, and a way to see the final URL after any redirects (the address bar is enough; a browser's network panel is better).

Scope

One page, every element whose label is a promise: buttons, and links styled or worded as calls to action. Observation first: this week's workflow records destinations before anyone changes one. Changing a destination is a small edit, but it is a change to the page that earns money, so it gets the same treatment as any change: recorded, reversible, re-checked.

Safe inspection workflow

1. Identify the primary call to action by its label. Not the biggest button — the one whose label states the thing the visitor came for. Write the label down verbatim.
2. Click it on a phone and record the final URL. After every redirect. If the address bar shows something different from the link's href, note both.
3. Ask whether the destination keeps the promise. Is the promised thing — the form, the file, the calendar, the product — visible without scrolling or hunting? A booking button that lands on a page where the form is below three paragraphs is keeping the promise slowly.
4. Repeat for every promise-shaped label. Book, Buy, Download, Get, Start, Try, Call, Email. Make a short table: label · href · final URL · promise kept? On a phone.
5. Check the tel: and mailto: links. Tapping “Call us” should open the dialler with the right number. A surprising number of sites carry a number from a previous office.
6. Fix, then re-check. For each mismatch, decide where the fault lives: the label (it promises the wrong thing) or the destination (it is the wrong page). Fix one, not both. Re-run step 2 for the fixed element. Record the before and after.

Copyable prompt

For a repository you can hand to Claude Code. It lists the promises and their hrefs from the source; the phone check is still yours, because rendered destinations, redirects and above-the-fold visibility are things only a real device shows.

Read-only. Do not edit any file.

For the page at [PATH OR TEMPLATE], list every link and button whose visible text is a call to action — a verb that promises something (Book, Buy, Download, Get, Start, Try, Call, Email, Subscribe, Apply) — including those rendered by components, partials or CMS blocks.

For each: the visible label (exactly), the href or action as written in the source, the file and line, and whether the target exists in this repository (a route, a page, a file). Flag any href that is "#", "/", a homepage, a generic contact page, a tel: or mailto: value, or a URL on a different host — with a one-line reason it deserves a look.

Output a table. Do not fetch external URLs. Do not guess at what a destination contains: report what the source says and mark "verify on device" for the rest.

Example evidence

An example record written for this page.

Weekly Fix #2 — CTA destinations — /free-assessment — 2026-09-24, phone (Android Chrome)
| Label                          | href        | Final URL   | Promise kept?             |
|--------------------------------|-------------|-------------|---------------------------|
| Book a free 15-minute assessment | /contact  | /contact    | NO — generic contact page |
| Call the clinic                | tel:+44...  | dialler     | yes                       |
| See what to expect             | /faq        | /faq        | yes                       |
Fix: href → /free-assessment#book (the form on the same page). Re-checked 14:20: lands on the form, visible without scrolling. Before/after screenshots kept.

Completion criteria

• The primary call to action was identified by its label.
• Its final destination after redirects was recorded and compared with the promise.
• The destination was checked on a phone: the promised thing is visible without hunting.
• Every other promise-shaped label on the page was listed with its destination.
• Mismatches were fixed at the label or at the destination — and re-checked.

Common mistakes

• Reading the href instead of following it. Redirects change destinations silently. The address bar after the click is the truth.
• Fixing the label to match a wrong destination. If the button says “Book” and the page has a booking form somewhere, point the button at the form; do not rename the button “Contact us”.
• Checking on a desktop. Above the fold is a different place on a phone.
• Changing several buttons at once with no record. When conversions move next week you will not know which change did it.

Go further

• The Conversion Functionality Lab has a button that promises a booking and lands on /contact — and the test that catches it.
• How to audit a landing page with Claude Code covers message match from ad to page to button, and includes a generator for a functional validation checklist for your page.