How To Create a Landing Page in 6 Easy Steps

So, we know that landing pages themselves are important. But just having one isn’t enough – when building a landing page, you also need to make sure that the end result will be high quality.

How do you do that, exactly? Don’t worry – we’ve outlined the most important landing page best practices to follow to create the best possible page for your site! We’ll explain them below, but first, in short:

Have a Clear Goal

In order to clearly signal to visitors what you want them to do once they land on your page, you have to first have that end goal in mind when you’re creating the page. Having a clear goal will help you tailor your landing page content and design so that it encourages users to take the action you want them to!

This goal could be having visitors sign up to your email list, purchase a product, or get in touch with you directly. To identify which goal you want to pursue, it helps to figure out which end result would be the most valuable to you right now.

For example, do you want to grow your audience and increase their awareness of your brand? In that case, encouraging people to sign up for an email newsletter would be a great goal. Do you want to increase conversions and drive sales? Then try steering visitors toward purchasing a product.

Write Captivating Copy

Your landing page copy should be clear, concise, and persuasive. It should highlight the benefits of your product or service and explain why visitors should take action – and it should do so as efficiently as possible: readers only consume about 20% of content on a page, so you’ll want to keep it brief!

Using strong headlines is one way to make your content easier to read. By breaking up the page and making it more scannable, you make your messages easier for readers to digest.

Social proof – quotes and testimonials from real-life satisfied customers – are also important to include since 88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Find Out More

Not sure how to adapt your writing style to create captivating copy for the web? Check out our 19 tips for writing online.

Prioritize the Call To Action

A call to action, or CTA, is the messaging that will ultimately drive your visitors to take a desired action. It’s an extremely important part of a landing page because it encourages conversion. Landing page CTAs often take the form of a clickable button, so the copy you use must be direct and easy to understand.

The copy isn’t the only important part, though – you’ll want to make sure that the button itself stands out clearly, so pay attention when choosing factors like its color and shape!

Find Out More

Read our guide, How to Write a Call To Action, to make sure you get yours just right!

Design a User-Friendly Landing Page

Every page on a website will benefit from quality web design, and landing pages are no exception! So, what exactly is quality design? For starters, your landing page should be visually appealing and easy to navigate.

It’s also a good idea to use high-quality images and videos to break up your text and make your landing page more engaging.

Test and Optimize Your Landing Page

Once your landing page is live, it’s important to test and optimize it regularly. This will help you ensure that your landing page is performing at its best and converting as many visitors as possible.

A/B testing is the most common method of testing a landing page. It involves changing one or multiple “variables” on one version of your landing page and leaving a second version the same, to see how positively or negatively your engagement and conversion rates are impacted by the change.

Now that we’re caught up on some landing page best practices, it’s time to put them into action! Read on for six actionable steps you can follow to help you in building a landing page.

1. Set Your Campaign Goal

It pays off to create your landing page with a defined goal in mind – this is the best way to be sure that your visitors will be presented with a clear action to take when they arrive on your page.

To identify the goal you want your landing page to achieve, first narrow the possibilities down to a shortlist. Signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product are some achievable, beneficial landing page goals.

2. Choose a Landing Page Template

It’s true that you could start building a landing page from scratch, but that method costs a lot of time and effort – and money, if you choose to hire a web designer to do it for you!

The more cost-effective path to a professional-looking landing page is to choose a free landing page template. These templates cover the basic functions in a clean and effective way, and the best part is you can then build upon them yourself to add some personality and unique imagery – no coding experience required!

3. Design Your Landing Page

This is another area where having a quality, pre-built template will go a long way in helping you create a landing page that’s easy to navigate and follows design best practices.

A template is like a coloring book – it’ll help you stay inside the lines, for example by keeping CTAs in the most visible place and aligning all of your images and text. But it still gives you free reign to exercise some creativity, like in choosing your website color palette.

4. Add Your Content

High-quality content is indeed important, but your writing also needs to be formatted in a reader-friendly way. This means making the text as scannable as possible by breaking it up with plenty of headings and subheadings, and ensuring that your body copy is also separated into short sections and paragraphs.

That’s not to say that substantial content isn’t important – short content (300-900 words) actually attracts 21% less traffic than articles with 900-1200 words. It’s just important to make sure they’re formatted optimally!

5. Publish Your Landing Page

Once you are happy with the design of your landing page, it’s time to publish! Most landing page builders offer a variety of publishing options, such as publishing to your own domain or publishing to a subdomain.

A subdomain is a separate part of your website, but it still exists under your own domain name. The advantage of publishing your landing page to a subdomain is that it allows you to distinguish your landing page as a separate entity from the “regular” pages on your site.

6. Optimize Your Landing Page

Once you’ve created a stellar landing page, it’s important to maintain it by continuously checking back to see what other improvements you can make. By analyzing the performance of your landing page, you’ll be able to identify potential areas of improvement and make tweaks based your findings. These could include using different wording in your headings or a different color for your CTA.

Then, you can compare the performance of different versions of the page to see which is most effective. Think of your landing page like a plant – you’ll need to water it continuously in order to see it thrive!

As we’ve mentioned, once your landing page is live, it’s important to test and optimize it regularly. This will help you ensure that your landing page is performing at its best and converting as many visitors as possible.

Here are a few tips for landing page optimization:

1. Test different headlines and subheadlines. See which headlines and subheadlines resonate best with your audience and generate the most conversions. A few well-written words can go a long way, especially in headlines.
2. Test different body copy. Try different lengths and styles of body copy to see what works best for your audience. We recommend breaking up body copy into shorter, more digestible paragraphs wherever possible.
3. Test different calls to action. Different calls to action can have very different impacts on your conversions. For example, customized CTAs can convert up to 42% more visitors! A customized CTA is one that makes an effort to stand out to your target audience, rather than using generic language like “buy now” or “click here.”
4. Test different landing page designs. Try different layouts, colors, and images to see what makes for the most engaging user experience. This is also a good opportunity to build your brand by choosing consistent designs that reflect your business goals and personality!
5. Use A/B testing. This is the easiest way to compare two different versions of your landing page and see which one performs better. The best part is, you can run A/B tests as often as you would like to – so any time you get a bright new idea for your landing page, it won’t hurt to try it out and see how it performs.

Whether it’s landing page best practices, landing page optimization, or simply the most relevant landing page statistics, by now you’ve got all the information you need to get started creating a stellar, effective page of your own.

Which of these tips and tricks will you test out first? We’d love to find out in the comments!