Designing & Optimizing Landing Pages

A landing page is a specific page on your website that you’re driving traffic to – when visitors “land” on your page, you want them to take a specific action.

When you run a campaign and a person clicks on a link in an advertisement or an email or even a social media post, they’re expecting to find more information about your campaign as soon as they land on your site. The goal of a landing page is to convert as many visitors as possible into subscribers, members, customers, etc. – however you intend to derive value from them. You want to remove all distractions and motivate them to complete a specific action.

Typical Uses of Landing Pages

  • Product description/purchase page
  • Product trial page (ie. try now, free for 30 days)
  • Registration page for a special event (ie. a webinar, in-store event, conference, party)
  • Promotion page for a contest or sweepstakes
  • Newsletter subscription page
  • Member registration page

Landing Page Design Best Practices

Most often, you will drive traffic to these pages through some type of campaign effort. Get the most from your investment by leveraging landing page design best practices.

  1. Articulate a clear “call to action” message. You have only a few seconds to grab each visitor’s attention – make sure they can find the information they’re expecting.
  2. Remove as many distractions as possible, including your standard site-wide navigation elements.
  3. Make sure the page loads quickly – studies show that even a half second increase in page load time can cause you to lose almost 20% of your potential visitors.
  4. Keep all of the important information “above the fold” – assume that nobody is going to scroll down a page.
  5. The visuals and wording on your landing page should tie to the advertisement that drove the visitor to your site – no bait and switch.

Also, if you’re using photos of people on your landing page, I read an interesting recommendation somewhere: the people in the photo should never be looking directly into the camera as the page visitor immediately gets distracted by the photo and misses your message. Ideally, you want to use a photo with people looking in the direction of your submit / purchase / register / try now button. The page visitor will naturally follow the line of sight of the people in the photo and be guided straight to your conversion action.

You should create multiple versions of your landing pages and optimize them over time with A/B testing. It’s impossible to predict which combinations of messages and images will best deliver the results you’re aiming for.

Check out these great resources for more information about landing pages:


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