Landing pages are very powerful and valuable tool in the arsenal of anyone promoting their offerings online. This post aims to outline the basics of landing pages, what makes an effective landing page and the main ways to create a perfect one.
What Is Landing Page or Microsite?
Landing pages (sometimes called microsites) are one-purpose pages where a visitor is expected to do one specific thing and not get distracted by menus and sidebars. In other words, it is a squeeze page that is specifically set up to sell a product or service and to redirect traffic to the main website.
Landing pages can be considered to be separate from the website they are hosted. They rarely use the same design as the website that sits in the root of the domain; and there is no navigation menu that links the landing page to the website homepage, and vice versa.
What Makes a Perfect Landing Page?
Although there is no exact formula to making a perfect landing page, there are some common rules of thumb to increase your chances of making a winning one. This is where the experts and stats are in agreement on landing page fundamentals:
- Are short, clean and uncluttered.
- Provide high-quality content outlining the benefits of the offer.
- Use concise and powerful headlines.
- Have a flawless design.
- Contain relevant, quality images and videos where appropriate.
- Have a multiple, strong calls-to-action throughout the page.
- Make it easy to convert.
- Are easy to scan at a quick glance.
Your Development Option
- Now when we’ve introduced the basics of landing pages, it’s time to take a look at how you can create one for your WordPress site. There are a number of options for creating a landing page with WordPress CMS. They fall into 4 categories:
- Doing it yourself.
- Using plugins or online tools.
- Using themes.
- Hiring a developer.
Create Landing Page On Your Own (DIY Approach)
This is the most old-school approach out there when we’re talking about WordPress. It means that you can always create a custom page template manually and do whatever you wish inside of this template. The best way of building a landing page through a custom page template is to simply take the default page.php template and play around with its CSS/HTML structure.
Taking the DIY approach and creating a landing page without ringing the bell of a developer has many benefits, including allowing you to get started straight away, without the need for evaluating, installing, and getting to grips with any new tools or services. However, this where coding skills are required.
Make Use of Plugins or Online Tools
In case you are not willing to get your hands dirty with mountains of codes and scripts – make sure to make use of a plugin. There is a gazillion of landing page plugins out there, both for free and on a paying basis. They all work more or less the same way – they offer a collection of landing page templates for different purposes. Once installed and activated, go on customizing the page using the plugin’s settings.
Like plugins, there are many online tools for creating landing pages that can effortlessly be found through quick Google search. These basically work like WYSIWYG website builders, allowing you to select and use user interface components to create a landing page within a short period of time.
Free Plugins that are Worth to Evaluate
- WordPress Landing Pages: the best free option. Also includes a visual editor and allows you to compare conversion rates for different page designs
- Parallax Gravity: includes a visual editor for building the page layout and adding call-to-action buttons
- Impact Template Editor: create or edit existing WordPress page templates for any type of page, including landing pages
Make Use of Themes
Depending on the WordPress theme your site is using, it might likely include a page template that will allow you to remove some of the distracting page elements and concentrate on useful rest of your site. There is a plethora of WordPress themes that can easily be Googled at the web. These page themes often include such useful features like local scrolling, eye catching sliders, features boxes and more aiming to make building your landing page easy. One more important thing to be mentioned is that more advanced users could even create their own page template, stripping out other page elements including the navigational aids and header area. However, this approach takes you into the territory where you’ll need a developer to get the job done effectively.
Custom Landing Page Development
This is the way to get the best result, that is high quality landing page. You can turn to designer/developer to get a landing page created from scratch on the basis of your existing site layout. The developer will need to do the following things: integration with your email list (for landing pages that intend to capture emails), proper use of Google Analytics for A/B testing and conversion tracking, and good, clean design and development. This probably will be the most expensive method, but you will get the highest-quality and most customized result in the end.
Bottom Line
Despite the fact that landing pages are clearly not something that WordPress was meant to support natively, this doesn’t turn out to be such a problem after all. We’ve outlined 4 common ways to build WordPress landing pages. In case you find yourself skilled enough – the DIY route is worth to evaluate. If you have neither the time nor the design skills to build one on your own – you can use a plugin or online converter to craft one. And if you have a budget and wish your landing page could bring your business a lot of value – consider hiring an expert.
Which way turned out right or wrong for you? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
