Decision fatigue is a psychological phenomenon where the quality of decisions deteriorates after a long session of decision-making. On the web, it manifests as choice paralysis: faced with too many options, visitors choose none. The famous jam study (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000) showed that offering 24 jam varieties instead of 6 reduced purchases by 90%.
On landing pages, decision fatigue shows up in predictable places: pricing pages with 5+ tiers, navigation with 15 items, hero sections with three competing CTAs, and forms with optional fields that make people wonder "should I fill this out?" Every unnecessary decision you ask visitors to make reduces the likelihood they'll make the one that matters.
Designing against decision fatigue
The fix is aggressive simplification. One primary CTA per section. Three pricing tiers maximum (with one highlighted as recommended). Form fields that are either required or removed — never optional. Navigation stripped to essentials or removed entirely on dedicated landing pages. Default selections for any configuration options.
This feels counterintuitive — don't customers want options? Sometimes, but not on a conversion page. Your landing page's job is to guide one specific decision. Save the options for post-conversion. Pages that respect decision fatigue consistently outperform "comprehensive" pages that give visitors everything at once.