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What Is a Landing Page on a Website

What Is a Landing Page on a Website?

One of the best things about using digital tools to improve your business is the sheer variety you’ll have at your disposal. From ads to search engine optimization, and from social media to customer relationship management, there’s always something that could blow wind into your sails and get you to your goals faster. Where there’s such a variety, however, it’s easy to sometimes miss some of the important tools, leaving you with gaps in your knowledge. If that’s what got you looking into what is a landing page on a website, don’t worry – you’re in the right place.

In this article, we’ll give you a quick primer on landing pages. We’ll cover the basics and answer the questions such as what they are, and what’s the difference between a landing page and a microsite. We’ll also make sure you leave with a few good tips that will help you design landing pages that deliver results. So get ready to dive in.

What Is a Landing Page?

You probably already know that websites can have pages that perform specific tasks. About us, pages are created to inform visitors about the website’s owners. Homepages, on the other hand, let visitors know exactly where they are in as few words or images as possible. Then there are product pages for displaying products, 404 pages for letting people know the thing they wanted to see isn’t there, and the list can go on.

A landing page is one such highly specialized page. Its main purpose is to be the page where people land – the page people come across – when they try to reach your website through ads, links, search results, or social media. When people stumble across your landing page, its design is supposed to get them to perform a certain action, usually to sign up, purchase, or otherwise move further down one of your funnels.

Both landing pages and homepages are designed to be the first point of contact your visitor has with your website or online presence in general. And while you certainly can use your homepage to push for specific actions – get people to check out new arrivals in your store, for example – you usually can’t afford to strip it down and focus it on that message as much as you can a landing page. Homepages need navigation, at least. Landing pages don’t.

It’s the same with microsites – while they’re certainly useful for creating small sections of a website that have a high degree of independence from the main content of your website, using them to catch a lead would be overkill, and not as effective. Landing pages’ laser-focus on a specific task is what makes them different from other types of pages, and it’s what makes them irreplaceable.

What Kinds of Landing Pages Are There?

There’s no such thing as an official classification for landing pages, and you’ll soon learn there are more than a few reasons to use a landing page. However, based on the goal you want the people landing on them to perform, you can group them into two broad categories.

The first are the clickthrough landing pages. These are the pages where the most prominent element is a call-to-action button. Everything else on that page – text, images, or video content – is there to get the visitor to click the call-to-action button and move along in the funnel.

The other type of landing page are lead-generating landing pages. With these pages, the goal is to extract some information from the visitor and make a lead out of them. Usually, these pages will have some type of form that will allow the visitor to leave their email or any other information you deem important.

Why Would You Use Landing Pages?

By now, you should understand the value proposition of landing pages. They’re performance-oriented assets that are easy and inexpensive to build, highly versatile, and with a couple of good design decisions, very effective. Landing pages are routinely used to grow email lists, increase conversion rates, and gather valuable insights into your target audience.

Their benefits don’t end there, however. It’s fairly easy to set up measurements for some performance indicators on landing pages, and because they are also inexpensive to create and deploy, landing pages are one of the most testable assets you can have online. If you ever wondered how a difference in a single word might affect a page’s ability to convert, landing pages will provide you with the best possible testing grounds to find that out.

It’s also hard to understate just how many different occasions or tactics call for the use of landing pages. Want to build a newsletter? Create a landing page. Need to push your new eBook? Make a landing page for that, too. Have a course to sell, a new product, or an event? You guessed it – let people sign up or buy through a landing page. You can offer trials, get people to download your app, or let people know your band is on tour – all with the little help of a landing page.

What Are Some Landing Page Best Practices?

Landing pages are great and useful, and you’ll likely get plenty of practice building them. But why not give yourself a head start and learn a thing or two about creating landing pages before you dive into it? Here are some things you should keep in mind when building landing pages.

Give Landing Page Builders a Go

We’ve mentioned before that landing pages are easy to build and deploy, and they are, but only if you use the proper tools for it. Creating every landing page from scratch can be a tedious process, and it makes things like testing a real drain on your time.

This being WordPress, however, you can rely on WordPress plugins or even templates to make the process easier and quicker. You’ll still have to make some important design decisions, sure, but a good landing page builder can do a lot of heavy lifting for you.

Keep It On Point

There are many more ways to get a landing page wrong than to get it right. Your copy could be off, or you could have too much or too little of it. You can have too many fields in the form, or your CTA can be drowned out by other visuals on the page.

Landing pages don’t have a lot of elements and every element that’s on them has to serve the same purpose the best it can. That’s why it’s important to get good visuals, and great copy, to have it all follow the same narrative, and lead to the same resolution – filling out the form or clicking the CTA button. Everything that’s “extra” doesn’t belong there.

Use Different Ways to Drive Traffic to Landing Pages

How do you get people to visit your landing pages? In the same way you would get them to visit any other page on your website. You can have search engines or social media ads to get traffic to your landing pages. You can also have various organic sources, too, as well as emails and referrals.

You can have different landing pages for different traffic sources or use different sources to target different segments of your audience. There’s plenty of fun stuff you can do with mixing and matching landing pages and traffic sources. So get ready for it, create a system, and remember to track who came from where.

Track Performance

It goes without saying that everything that goes on with a landing page can be tracked and that most of the things that can be tracked should be tracked. Whatever tool you’re using to monitor performance and gather metrics and indicators should be hooked up to your landing pages and taking in all the data you can later use to improve your pages’ performance.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Landing pages are invaluable assets for any type of website – you can have an affiliate blog, a store, or a business website for your bakery, and sooner or later you’ll find a use for a landing page. Because they’re so effective and easy to set up and get online, it’s easy to get carried away and release landing pages without proper forethought. Don’t get into that trap – make sure you know what they are, how to use them, and how to build them first. At the very least, set up the tracking that will let you learn from mistakes and improve your landing page game.

We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!

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