Our services page had six buttons. One in the hero, one inside each of the five service rows, and one in the prefooter. Every one of them said "Start a project". Six chances to convert, or so the logic goes.
Six identical buttons do not multiply intent. They dilute it. A button is a claim that this is the moment; making the claim six times proves it was never true any of those times. The reader learns to scroll past the shape.
What we kept
One. The prefooter carries it, because that is the honest position: you have read the page, here is the door. The hero lost its button entirely on most pages. A hero is there to make you want to keep reading, and a button in a hero is an admission that the words underneath it might not manage that.
The secondary action is not a second button. It is an underlined link. It looks like less because it is less, and that is the whole point of a hierarchy: the shapes have to disagree or there is no order.
The button itself
Ours has no background fill and no border. It is a label, a small square with an arrow, and a green wash that rises on hover. On a page where nothing else is a pill, a pill would be the loudest object on the screen for no reason. Removing the fill dropped the button's volume to where it belongs: present, findable, not shouting.
The rule
One primary action per page. If a section feels like it needs its own button, that section has failed to make its case and a button will not fix it. Delete the button; fix the section.