Someone taps the link in your bio and gets roughly one screen. On a phone that is your photo, your name, three or four lines of text, and the first two buttons. Everything below that is a scroll, and a scroll is a decision.
So the useful question is not what to put on a link page. It is what to put in the part that arrives before anyone has committed to anything. That part has to answer three things: who you are, what you make, and what a visitor can do right now.
Most first screens answer one of the three, and answer it in the voice of a T-shirt slogan.
The page I am going to pick apart
I have built this example out of pages I have looked at rather than lifting one whole. Partly because a page with three links and a few hundred followers belongs to a person, not a case study, and partly because the same four or five habits turn up over and over, so a composite is more honest than pretending one page contains them all.
So: Nadia. She crochets bucket hats by hand, sells them through a Shopify store, and posts short videos of the yarn going round. Three links, which is a completely reasonable number of links. More people should have three.
Her page, as it stands:
The photo is cropped out of a group shot from a wedding. Her name reads nadia ✨. The bio underneath says chaos in progress | slow fashion | doing it my way 🌿. The three buttons are labelled SHOP NOW, insta, and contact me.
None of that is a catastrophe. It is the page you make in eleven minutes on a Tuesday and then do not look at again for a year, which describes almost every link page I have ever opened, including ones belonging to people selling well.
Here is the gap. Someone has just watched twenty seconds of a hat being made. They know they saw a hat. They do not know whether it is for sale, whether Nadia made it or resold it, what it costs, how long it takes, or whether it can reach them. The first screen answers none of those, and the bio spends its four lines on mood.
Who you are, in the sense the visitor means
There is a difference between a bio and a personal history, and the bio field tends to attract the second one.
A personal history sounds like this: I have always loved making things, I taught myself to crochet during a rough year, and it turned into something I never expected. That may well be true and it may well matter to people later, once they care. It is answering a question nobody standing at your front door has asked.
A bio answers what you make, who it is for, and where you are. Three facts, no arc.
Before:
chaos in progress | slow fashion | doing it my way 🌿
After:
I crochet bucket hats by hand in Leeds. Made to order, usually two weeks. Ships across the UK and EU.
Look at what arrived. Made to order tells someone why there is not a rack of stock. Two weeks removes the objection they would otherwise have to email about, or more likely not email about. Shipping tells a reader in Lisbon that this page is for them and a reader in Ohio that it is not, which is a kindness to both.
Look at what left. Slow fashion is a category Nadia belongs to, not a thing she does. Chaos in progress is a feeling. Doing it my way is a position held against an opponent the visitor cannot see. None of the three survives contact with a stranger who has been on the page for one and a half seconds.
The name field is worth the same treatment. nadia ✨ becomes Nadia | Hook & Field, because the shop name is what people half-remember from the video, and it should match what they find.
The photo is doing bio work whether you like it or not
A cropped wedding photo says a person exists. A photo of Nadia holding one of the hats says what she makes before a single word is read.
The cost is real. A product photo in the avatar slot feels less like a person and more like a brand, and if your whole appeal is that you are a person, you lose a little of that. Early on, when nobody knows what you sell, I would still take the trade.
Three links, relabelled
SHOP NOW is an instruction without an object. It tells a visitor to do something and not what the something involves.
After: Bucket hats, £38, made to order.
That label does three jobs. It names the product, it prices it, and it repeats the terms so the price does not feel like an ambush on the next page. Putting the price on the button will lose you some taps. Those taps were mostly people who were going to leave the Shopify page anyway, and now they leave earlier and think nothing worse of you. It is a trade, not a free win, and if you are running ads to the page you may want those extra clicks for other reasons.
insta is the interesting one, because it might not deserve to be a link at all. If the Instagram account is a mirror of the TikTok, the people arriving from TikTok have nothing to gain by going there. Social icons at the top of the page handle that case at a fraction of the visual cost, and the button slot goes free.
contact me becomes Custom colours and sizing: email me. Same destination, but now it is a reason rather than an obligation. Most people will not use it. The ones who do are the ones who were about to bounce because the green hat was not quite the green they wanted.
Order matters more than most things on this list. Shop first, custom second, socials as icons. Nobody who wants to buy should have to scroll past anything.
That leaves a free slot, and the honest move is often to leave it empty. Two confident links beat five links where three are there to make the page look inhabited. If you are still deciding whether the shop link should point at Shopify, TikTok Shop or nothing more complicated than a form, we wrote about that in TikTok Shop vs Shopify vs just a link.
Where we help, and where we are part of the problem
This is the point where I should admit that Relay makes the vague version of this page very easy to build. Unlimited links on every plan, five themes free and all forty-seven on Pro, eight fonts, custom colours, background images, per-link images. Choosing a theme is the enjoyable part of the job. The bio field is four grey lines of nothing and it is the part that actually decides whether a stranger understands you. I have watched myself pick a font instead of writing a sentence, and the sentence was the work.
What we can give you is a free plan with no card and no time limit, your own photo and bio, social icons, headings and dividers so a longer page has some structure, tap and view counts, a QR code, and a story-sized share image. Pro is $30 a year or $4 a month plus VAT, and adds the rest of the themes and fonts, scheduled links, inline players, email capture, and removing the Relay badge.
We hold data in the European Union, self-host the fonts, and run no advertising and no third-party analytics. That last part cuts against you as well as for you. Tap and view counts will tell you that 214 people saw the page and 19 tapped the shop button. They will not tell you why the other 195 did not, because we do not run session recordings or heatmaps and are not planning to. You are left reasoning from wording, which is roughly what this whole article is. We also have no custom domains and no payments, so the checkout lives on Shopify or Gumroad or wherever else, and the page is only ever the doorway. If you want the version of that comparison where a competitor wins some rows, it is on our Relay versus Linktree page.
A test that costs nothing and stings a bit
Screenshot your page on a phone. Crop it at the point where the scroll starts. Send that image to someone who does not know what you do, and ask them two questions: what does this person sell, and what would you tap.
If they cannot answer the first, the bio is the problem. If they can answer the first but hesitate on the second, the button labels are the problem. If they answer both in under three seconds, the first screen is done and you can go back to choosing fonts with a clear conscience.
You can do a weaker version of the same test alone by looking at the screenshot tomorrow morning rather than tonight. Not as good. Still better than reading your own page in the state of mind you were in when you wrote it.
What this edit does not fix
Wording does not create traffic. If your videos do not mention that there is a link, or the link is buried in a bio nobody reads, then a perfect first screen will be admired by eleven people a week. That is a different problem, and it lives further upstream. There is more on how the early weeks tend to actually go in how long until the first sale, and on what paid traffic does and does not buy in what $50 of ads actually buys you.
It also does not fix a product nobody wants. A clear page selling something unwanted is a clear page selling something unwanted, and you will now find that out faster, which is a benefit disguised as a disappointment.
What it does fix is the quiet loss of people who were interested and left confused. That group is invisible, so it is easy to believe it does not exist.
The bio field is four lines long. Rewriting it takes about ten minutes, costs nothing on the free plan, and you can do it before the next video goes up.