
Last Updated on October 11, 2024
Here’s the punchline:
When the stakes are low, best practices can save time and brainpower. When you don’t yet know a better way, best practices are a good starting point. But when something truly matters? That’s when you should toss out the rulebook and think for yourself.
What’s a best practice anyway?
Best practices are heuristics based on collective wisdom or consensus over time that allow us to operate on a sort of autopilot.
Some are general:
- Know your audience
- Personalize your content
- Run experiments
Can’t really argue with these, but then again, they’re not very useful, are they? True enough, but broad.
Some are specific:
- Use emojis in email subject lines
- Write action-based CTA copy by filling in the blank “I want to ____”
- Optimize YouTube thumbnails with contrasting colors and human faces
These are usually ephemeral but based on real and timely data and feedback. They represent “what’s working now.”
There’s no such thing as a universal best practice. I know this because I’ve worked across industries and business models, and what’s common in one space is foreign in another one.
Generally, though, a best practice is something a lot of people do and something that generally works pretty well. It’s often more of a “common practice” than something defined by its quantitative performance.
When it doesn’t matter or you don’t know any better, use best practices
We all have finite time and resources.
Although the purist in me wishes we could run experiments on everything, we can’t.
And because we have finite time and resources, anything we spend time or money on necessarily means there’s an opportunity cost– that time and money is not spent on an alternative action.
So it’s important to me to spend most of my time, attention, and money on the things that matter the most, the highest expected value items. This means you have to have the zen-like ability to let small fires burn and to outsource a percentage of your thinking to commodified best practices.
Basically, innovate where it counts and be prototypical elsewhere.
Sometimes, boring best practices work better than the clever stuff
SEO is a place where this balancing act plays out.
For example, we’re working with a client in the technical data space. They have a unique point of view on data quality, a perspective that allows them to stand out. Nobody else is talking about it the way they are, so we lean into their expertise when creating content.
But when it comes to things like page titles, there’s no need to be clever. Best practices win here. If the keyword is “data quality,” the title is “What is Data Quality?” or “The Ultimate Guide to Data Quality.” Simple, effective, and optimized for search intent.
Behind the scenes, we stick to boring best practices too—technical SEO, link building, and keyword research—so we can focus on innovating in the ways that matter, such as the angle of the content and their unique brand POV.
When it comes to platform / channel optimization (Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, whatever), you probably don’t want to fight city hall. Their algorithms approximate user desires, and appealing to these desires is the way to make these platforms work for you. You can still say smart, on-brand stuff. You don’t have to resort to click-bait or audience capture or reality TV feuds.
But format it in a way that adheres to prototypical best practices (which will evolve over time).
Conservation & prioritization: ego depletion and diminishing returns
In addition to best practices functionally working better than clever stuff, there’s only so much creativity you can expend. Best to use that on meaningful innovation.
Ego depletion tells us that our decision-making power is limited. The more mental energy we spend making small, repetitive decisions, the less we have left to innovate where it counts.
There’s a great Nassim Taleb quote I love about editors focusing too much on minutiae and missing the important things:
“Incidentally, those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere – and editing provides a quite fitting example. Over my writing career I’ve noticed that those who overedit tend to miss the real typos (and vice versa). I once pulled an op-ed from The Washington Post owing to the abundance of completely unnecessary edits, as if every word had been replaced by a synonym from the thesaurus. I gave the article to the Financial Times instead. The editor there made one single correction: 1989 became 1990. The Washington Post had tried so hard that they missed the only relevant mistake. As we will see, interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most.”
Diminishing marginal utility also plays a role. There’s little to gain from reinventing the wheel on every decision.
For example, I run an agency.
Agencies have been built, managed, and scaled before me and they’ll continue to do so after me.
So there are a certain number of decisions I can simply automate based on what others are doing and have done. I don’t, for example, need to think too hard about innovating on our P&L strategy. I can just stick to best practices that other agencies like ours have advised us to do.
Best practices are your starting point
Before you have data, best practices are a good starting point – your baseline.
For example, if you’re designing a CTA button, you can make sure it is high-contrast, large enough to notice, looks like a clickable button (affordance), and has specific and compelling copy. You don’t need to (and feasibly cannot) test 41 shades of blue.
Surprisingly strong results can come simply from following the instructions of people who have done what you’re trying to do and just copying the principles behind what they did.
When we launched our business, we looked at what other agencies were charging and charged similarly. Then we learned how to uniquely value our offers, and adjusted. We used stock contract templates until we hired a lawyer.
Best practices give you a good baseline from which to optimize and innovate.
When it matters, think for yourself
When I really dial in on an initiative, however, I want to stand out. I pour additional time and resources into make sure it really pops.
When I first launched the webinar program at CXL Institute, I had never run webinars before. CXL wasn’t doing them regularly either. Best practices at the time were pretty standard: bring on a well-known speaker, let them talk for 45 minutes (10 minutes of intro, 5 minutes of a sales pitch), and leave 10-15 minutes for Q&A.
But that didn’t sit right with me. I hated webinars like that.
Instead, I did the opposite. Minimal intro for the speaker—figured the audience already knew them by nature of signing up—and focused on hands-on, tactical, how-to content (usually done by screenshare). We made it interactive throughout, and guess what? No sales pitch. It was like a workshop, and it worked.
We got thousands of signups for each webinar and tons of attendance and engagement.
For everything else—landing pages, emails, recruiting speakers, copy—I stuck to best practices. The templates saved time and mental energy, letting me focus on innovating where it actually mattered.
We do the same thing with this newsletter. It’s remarkably longer than most agency newsletters. I use informal language and interweave cultural references with studies and research. I’m sometimes (pleasantly) shocked when I see our open and click-through-rates, and I love getting responses to these weirdly deep dive reads each week.
When best practices…aren’t
All of this presumes that best practices are actually best. Sometimes the collective wisdom is simply wrong, or at least your peer group and competitors have no idea what they are doing either.
Craig Sullivan wrote an amazing essay for CXL about this:
“You’ll be presented with an example or a screenshot of a site and in some cases, an exhortation to try or test [the best practices].
And they can be useful, if presented with a pinch of salt. They’re example patterns of something that might have been used elsewhere but to be honest, the UX expert doesn’t KNOW if that nice checkout payment pattern that stripe implements actually works or not. They might be running a test and it might totally suck.”
This checks out to me. Many of these best practices come from outside observers extrapolating patterns with little to no understanding of the actual data.
I distinctly remember reading breakdowns of things I had worked on at HubSpot that were misinterpreted if not completely wrong.
You never truly know if something will work until you try it for yourself.
Zig when they zag
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain
When everyone is doing the same thing, there is alpha in doing something different. Standing out.
- Everyone is running well-designed email campaigns? Try plain text.
- Everyone is talking about their AI-powered features? Find a new product messaging spin.
- Everyone is running virtual summits and webinars? Curate small IRL dinners.
- Everyone is using these corporate Memphis figures in their designs? Try real humans?

Peep Laja told me on the podcast that he came up with the distinctive CXL blog style by analyzing the market and realizing most content was shallow, opinion-based, and beginner level. He stood out by making all content “best in the world” on each topic, a comprehensive dive at an intermediate or advanced level with quotes from experts and research citations throughout.
Then, that style became more common over time. Thus, the need for constant evolution.
Want more insights like this? Subscribe to our Field Notes.