Calls to action — what the button says and where it sits

A call-to-action button — a CTA, in the industry’s own shorthand — is one of the few elements on a page where the correct behaviour is defined by a published standard rather than a matter of taste — its wording has to state what happens next, and its size has to be physically operable on a touchscreen. Both are checkable facts, not preferences.

What a CTA button’s wording has to do

WCAG 2.2’s Link Purpose criterion requires that the purpose of a link or control be determinable from its own text or its immediate context. In practice this rules out ambiguous button labels as an accessibility failure, not merely a style choice:

Weak	Why it fails the test	Stronger alternative
“Submit”	States the mechanical action, not the outcome	“Send my enquiry”
“Click here”	Says nothing about the destination or result	“Get a free quote”
“Learn more”	Vague about what will be learned	“See how pricing works”
“Continue”	Ambiguous on a multi-step form	“Next: contact details”
“Get started”	Generic across almost any product or service; states no outcome	“Book your inspection”

The pattern in every case is the same: the label should let a visitor predict, correctly, what happens when they act.

What the size and position have to do

WCAG 2.2’s Target Size (Minimum) criterion sets a 24 by 24 CSS pixel baseline for interactive controls, with defined exceptions for inline text links and controls where an equivalent larger target is available elsewhere. A call-to-action button smaller than that, or crowded tightly against other controls, is measurably harder to hit accurately on a touchscreen — which matters directly here because most small-business site traffic in Australia arrives on a phone, covered in full in the mobile section.

Position matters structurally rather than by convention: a call to action placed above the point where a visitor has actually finished reading what they need to decide asks for a commitment before the case for it has been made, while one placed only at the very bottom of a long page requires scrolling past everything to find it. The reliable pattern is to repeat the same action at more than one natural pause point in the content, rather than relying on a single placement to work for every visitor’s reading pattern.

A button and a link are not interchangeable, even when they look identical

A control that submits a form or triggers an action on the current page is, semantically, a button, and a control that navigates to a different page or a different section is a link — and using the correct underlying HTML element for each matters beyond visual styling, because screen reader software announces the two differently and keyboard users expect different behaviour from each (a button typically activates with both Enter and Space; a link only with Enter). A visually identical “Get a quote” control built as a link when it should be a button, or vice versa, passes a visual check while still failing users relying on assistive technology to understand what the control actually does.

An icon alone does not meet the wording requirement

A call to action built as an icon with no accompanying text — an arrow, a phone symbol, a chat bubble — generally fails the same Link Purpose requirement covered above, because an icon’s meaning is not reliably determinable without an accessible text label attached, even where the icon seems visually obvious to a sighted user familiar with common web conventions. Pairing an icon with visible text, or at minimum providing an accessible label a screen reader can announce even if the visible design is icon-only, is the structural fix.

One primary action, stated once

A page that gives equal visual weight to “Book now”, “Download our brochure” and “Follow us on Instagram” is not offering choice, it is diluting attention across three approximately-equal options with no signal about which the business actually wants. The structural fix is a single primary action, styled distinctly, repeated in more than one position if the page is long — with secondary actions (a phone number, a social link) present but visually subordinate.

For a phone-first trade business specifically, the call to action is very often a phone number rather than a form button at all, and treating it with the same visual weight and repetition logic applies — see phone-first design for trades and emergency services.

What this page will not claim

No specific conversion-lift percentage is attached to button colour, to a particular word choice beyond the clarity principle above, or to any specific placement pattern. Colour-contrast requirements are a real, sourced WCAG obligation and are covered on website accessibility in Australia — but “red converts better than green” is a folklore claim with no consistent, sourced basis and it does not appear here.

A short, checkable list

• The button text states the outcome of clicking, not the mechanical action
• The button meets the WCAG 2.2 minimum target size and has clear space around it
• There is one primary action per page, repeated at natural pauses in long content
• Secondary actions are visually distinguishable from the primary one
• On a phone-first business, a tappable phone number is treated as a call to action in its own right

What to do next

Audit an existing page’s buttons against the wording and size checks above — most fixes here are copy and CSS changes, not a rebuild, whether the button was designed in Figma, another design tool, or built directly in code. For a landing page built around a single call to action for paid traffic specifically, landing page design covers that service. For the accessibility standard behind the size requirement, website accessibility in Australia covers it in full.