Every website has at least one landing page, some have dozens. In the purest sense, any page where a visitor enters your website is a landing page. This idea is also proliferated because with organic search practices almost any page of your site could be the first page a visitor sees. However, in terms of marketing and advertising, a landing page is very specific page and stands apart from the rest of your site.

How Are Successful Landing Pages Made?

There are generally two specific calls to action for a landing page. You’re asking a user to either complete a purchase or to fill out a lead form. In order to focus on one of these two actions you need to focus on the design of your page. Many landing pages are completely dissociated from the rest of the site’s design. Here are some important factors to focus on when designing your pages:

  • Connect to Your Ad – You’ve just sent the user to a page based on an advertisement, you need to make sure that the message in your advertisement matches the message on your page. This may also carry into the graphics used.
  • No navigation – These pages are for their specific purposes only, we don’t want people becoming distracted, investigating other parts of the site, or reading any copy not related to our conversion goals.
  • Clean and clear – Include just enough information to complete the conversion and no more.
  • Make conversion easy – Don’t try and collect a lot of information on these pages. Get only what you need and make it crystal clear what that is.
  • Beautiful design – If you’re going to spend any money on content for your site, these are the pages to do it. Compelling images and maybe a well-executed video are good starting points. Color use, white space, and page flow all need to be considered.
  • Clear CTA – The single most important factor. Your call to action must be incredibly clear, very prominent on the page, and have enticing copy to complete the action.
  • Focus on the visitor – This isn’t the time to focus on the specs for your product, this is about what your product can do for the user. Make sure all of your content is directed to what they can get out of your offer.
  • Social proof – Use testimonials, quotes, or your customer list to show evidence of your offer’s worth.
  • Optimized – This page should be fast and lean.

How can we Build a Landing Page in WordPress

There are a lot of different ways to approach the creation of a landing page. While it comes down to two basic methodologies – you either implement them with a theme or a plugin – there is a lot of variety within those choices.

Theme Implementations

There are two ways to use a theme for your landing page. You can choose a theme geared to make landing pages like Divi (a page builder theme) or Landing, specifically built to implement landing pages.

In addition, many standard themes come with a blank template or a template without navigation so landing pages can be easily created. Even if that template doesn’t exist you can easily create a new template that strips down the distraction and simplifies the page.

Plugin Implementations

With plugins there are several options. There are landing page services like Unbounce, Lead Pages, or Instapage that can connect to your WordPress site via a proprietary plugin. Most of the heavy lifting happens off-site and they offer a great array of services to track your performance. Most offer A/B testing so that you can really dial in on what makes the page convert successfully.

There are some plugin solutions that add landing page capabilities right onto the site. Ultimate Landing Page and Page Builder are both available from the WordPress repository. This type of solution puts most of the tracking and overhead onto your server.

Finally, there are some page builder plugins like Beaver Builder and Elementor that make creating landing pages a snap. While there aren’t specific analytics for the page, they do allow you to leverage normal analytics tools to track conversions.

Additional Information

There are some great resources available to learn more. Unbounce has a great blog focused on landing pages, of particular note are co-founder Oli Gardner’s posts.

Kissmetrics has a blog about marketing, analytics, and testing and has some good resources.

Hubspot also writes frequent posts about landing pages and how to optimize them.

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