The mirror site playbook: build a high-intent microsite in 7 days

Your main website has to do too many jobs at once. It speaks to investors, candidates, customers, journalists, and the merely curious. By trying to be everything to everyone, it converts no one in particular. A mirror site fixes that.

A mirror site is a single-purpose microsite that exists for one buyer persona and one decision: book a call, request a demo, or download a specific asset. Everything else — careers, press, the full product tour — is stripped out.

Day 1: pick the buyer. Not 'mid-market manufacturers,' but 'plant managers at UK food manufacturers with 200–800 employees who are evaluating predictive maintenance.' If the buyer description fits on a Post-it, you're ready.

Day 2: write the promise. One sentence above the fold. It must name the buyer, the outcome, and the timeframe. 'Cut unplanned line stoppages by 40% in 90 days, without ripping out your existing PLCs.' That's a promise. 'Industry-leading solutions' is not.

Day 3: design the structure. Hero, two-sentence explanation, three proof points, one objection-handler, one social-proof block, one CTA, repeated three times. No nav menu beyond a logo. No footer links that lead anywhere except the CTA.

Day 4: buy the domain. A sharp, vertical-specific domain (.ai, .broker, .studio, or a clean .com) signals seriousness. Mirror sites on subdomains of the main site convert measurably worse — the buyer can sense the 'campaign' energy.

Day 5: build. A static framework (Astro, TanStack, Next static) deployed to a CDN. No CMS, no logged-in state, no chat widget. Speed is conversion. Aim for sub-1-second LCP on mobile.

Day 6: instrument. Plausible or PostHog for analytics, a single conversion event, and session replay so you can watch real buyers behave. Skip the heat-maps; watch ten sessions instead.

Day 7: drive traffic. Paid search on three buyer-intent keywords, LinkedIn outbound from a human, and a single mention in your nurture email. Watch the data for two weeks before you change anything.

Done right, a mirror site converts at 4–8% of paid traffic, versus 0.4–1% for a homepage. That's not a marginal improvement. That's a different category of asset.