When you see something you genuinely like on social media – something that feels thoughtful or useful, or that your mum would love for her birthday – you expect the next step to be easy. You tap the link in the bio or the link attached to the post, and you assume it’ll take you right to what you were looking for.

But then, almost without fail… you’re met with a wall of buttons.

Not ugly buttons. Just… a lot of them.

“Shop.”
“Podcast.”
“Freebie.”
“Course.”
“YouTube.”
“Blog.”
“Book.”
“Amazon.”

I’m the kind of person who looks up the menu before going to a restaurant, so this scenario feels a lot like I’m walking into the new steakhouse in town totally blind. My anxiety spikes, my brain starts scanning for the “right” choice, and I’m already halfway out the door because deciding feels like work.

That’s the reality of choice overload in digital experiences and it’s not just a gut feeling. Psychologists call this phenomenon the paradox of choice, an idea popularised by Barry Schwartz, and it’s the idea that having too many options can actually make people less satisfied and more likely to avoid deciding at all.

In UX research, this idea shows up again and again: when there are too many calls to action, users can feel confused about what to click next or where the most important thing even is.

The split second that you handed them a wall, they lost momentum. 

There’s a cognitive principle called Hick’s Law that helps explain what’s going on. Originally developed by psychologists William Hick and Ray Hyman in the early 1950s, it shows that the time it takes someone to make a decision increases as the number of choices increases.

In other words:
More options = Slower decisions.
Slower decisions = Higher hesitation.
And hesitation often becomes all out abandonment.

You’ve probably heard the terms choice paralysis or decision fatigue before and they’re not just theory, it’s measurable behaviour. 

This isn’t to say Linktree (or Stanstore or Beacons or really anything else in this category) is bad. There are totally valid use cases for link-in-bio tools like that – especially if you don’t have a website or a home base where people can land.

For example: if you’re a creator or influencer sending people out to affiliate links, storefronts, or platforms you don’t control, a link-in-bio tool is a practical way to organise those destinations. 

But the moment you sell something, offer a service, or have a website that matters to you in any way – the decision to use one of these tools stops being neutral. It becomes a choice. And that choice quietly affects everything downstream.

Every time you send someone off your ecosystem, you trade away:

• Ad revenue – If your site earns money through ads, a visit to that link-in-bio tool (or beyond it) earns you nothing. That attention is gone. That pageview is gone. That revenue opportunity is gone. Recipe creators, I’m looking at you.

• Domain authority – Every click to Linktree strengthens their site in search, not yours. Over time, you’re helping someone else rank while your own content stays harder to find.

• Traceability – On your own site, you can see where people came from, what they clicked, how long they stayed, what they read next. With Linktree, much of that journey becomes foggy or invisible.

• Retargeting power – On your site, you can pixel visitors, build audiences, and follow up with intention. On someone else’s platform, your ability to do that is limited or non-existent.

• Brand continuity – The tone, spacing, rhythm, and experience are no longer yours. Even a “customised” Linktree lives inside someone else’s constraints.

• Conversion leverage – You can’t shape what “next” looks like. You can only offer options and hope.

And yes, on top of all of that, the more things you ask someone to choose between, the more likely they are to leave before choosing anything at all.

You’re not just losing clicks.
You’re losing signal.
You’re losing learning.
You’re losing the ability to build a relationship over time.

In simple terms: your website keeps people in your world instead of dropping them into a neutral one. Every time you replace a direct pathway from Point A to Point B with a generic wall of links, you turn momentum into effort, and effort is where people quietly leave.