Crafting a compelling landing page is your golden ticket to guide potential customers seamlessly through your digital marketing funnel.
But creating a great landing page isn’t always easy. All too often, marketing teams pour budget into designing beautiful user interfaces and attention-grabbing videos, only for engagement to fall, well, a little flat.
Thankfully, there are a handful of tried and tested best practices that will enhance your landing page’s success—and we’ll cover them below.
What is the role of landing pages?
A landing page is a standalone web page created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in an email, or ads from Google or social media.
Unlike regular website pages like your homepage, which tend to encourage exploration and navigation, landing pages are focused on a single goal: conversion. This could mean signing up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, registering for a webinar, or purchasing a product.
When used correctly, these bespoke, targeted pages are highly effective at nurturing leads and boosting engagement. In fact, landing pages have the best signup rates—outperforming other methods like pop-ups, signup boxes, and wheels of fortune.
Important elements of a high-performing landing page
All great landing pages share a few common threads:
Headline and subheadline
The page headline and subheadline are often the first things visitors see when they land on your page. This landing page copy sets the tone for the entire experience and can either encourage or discourage potential customers.
Your headline needs to be short, sweet, and sharp. It should tell visitors what they will gain by staying on your page and engaging with your content. Think straightforward and direct—your visitors should understand immediately what’s in it for them.
Next, your subheadline should provide additional detail and context to support the headline. It’s an opportunity to elaborate on the main benefit and give visitors a reason to continue reading.
Like the headline, you’ll want to keep the subheadings concise and to the point. Aim to provide enough information to entice further reading without overwhelming the visitor.
Visuals and media
Visual elements are powerful tools that can significantly enhance the user experience and boost conversion rates.
After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Well-chosen visuals can draw visitors in, quickly communicate complex ideas, and even boost brand credibility.
That’s not to say you should overload your visitors with graphics: The probability of conversion drops 95% as the number of elements on a page goes from 400 to 6,000.
To get visuals right, you’ll need to use them thoughtfully. That means placing them carefully within your landing page to support written content, optimizing to ensure fast loading times, and using high-quality, authentic images and videos over stock photos.
Don’t forget the importance of accessibility, either! Make sure to include alt text for images, provide transcripts for videos, and ensure that visual content is easy to understand for visitors with visual impairments.
Call to action (CTA)
The call to action (CTA) is a prompt that encourages visitors to take a specific action. It’s a must-have on every landing page that guides visitors toward the conversion goal.
Creating effective CTAs involves more than just adding a button to your landing page. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Be clear and specific: Use clear and specific language that tells visitors exactly what they need to do. Phrases like “Download Now,” “Sign Up Today,” or “Get Started” leave no ambiguity about the desired action.
- Create a sense of urgency: Encourage immediate action by creating a sense of urgency. Words like “Now,” “Today,” or “Limited Time” can prompt visitors to act quickly.
- Use action-oriented language: Start your CTA with a strong action verb that inspires action. Words like “Join,” “Get,” “Start,” or “Learn” are effective at motivating visitors.
- Make it stand out: Ensure your CTA stands out visually on the page. Use contrasting colors, bold text, and ample white space to draw attention.
- Position strategically: Place your CTA where it’s easy to find and click. Common placements include above the fold, at the end of content sections, or in sticky headers/footers. Ensure that the CTA is visible without excessive scrolling.
Form design
Forms are often the final step in the landing page conversion process. They’re the gateway for visitors to become leads or customers. Understandably, that means their design is super important.
With forms, minimalism tends to work best. Long forms may seem intimidating and deter visitors from completing them. So, ask only for the information you absolutely need.
With people becoming more wary of sharing their personal data, it’s also a good idea to sweeten the deal through incentives. Offering a freebie like a discount, free resource, or entry into a giveaway can all increase customers’ motivation to complete your form.
Best practices for landing page optimization
Now that you know about the essential elements to include in a good landing page, here’s how to optimize them for success.
Keep it simple and focused
One of the most important principles in landing page design is simplicity and focus. A clutter-free, focused landing page minimizes distractions, guiding visitors toward the desired action without overwhelming them with too many choices or excessive information.
What does a simple, clean landing page look like? Here are some landing page examples for inspiration:
- Shopify’s landing page for its free trial is designed with simplicity in mind. The page features a clear headline, a supportive subheadline, and a prominent CTA button. There’s also a strong customer testimonial video to build credibility and trust. On top of that, the form is super brief, requiring just an email address to get started.
- Bitly’s Free Plan landing page is another example of clutter-free design. The page consists of a clear headline, short and snappy subheadline, and a bold CTA button that catches the eye.
Don’t forget about mobile optimization
With a significant portion of web traffic coming from mobile devices, optimizing your landing page for mobile needs to be a priority.
Not only does mobile optimization boost the user experience, but it also pays dividends in terms of SEO. That’s because search engines like Google prioritize mobile-friendly sites in their rankings.
Here are a few tips to help with mobile optimization:
- Embrace responsive design: Responsive design is all about making sure your webpage format renders well on every device. Keep this approach and its principles in mind for every landing page you create.
- Touch-friendly elements: Make sure buttons, links, and form fields are large enough for users to easily tap them with a finger for mobile users. Small or closely spaced elements can be frustrating for mobile users and lead to higher bounce rates.
- Readable text: Ensure that text is legible on smaller screens. Use a font size that is large enough to read without zooming, and maintain sufficient contrast between text and background for readability.
- Prioritize above-the-fold content: Make sure the most important information and your primary call to action are visible without the need to scroll. This ensures that mobile users can quickly understand the value of your offer and take action.
Increase loading speed
Page loading speed is a critical factor in user experience and conversions. Slow-loading pages frustrate users, leading to higher bounce rates and lower engagement. In line with this, sites that load in one second have conversion rates three times higher than sites that load in five seconds.
Thankfully, there are a few mechanisms you can use to ensure your pages load swiftly.
Look at your images and media. You’ll want to compress them to reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality. It’s also a good idea to use a content delivery network (CDN). This ensures that your content is distributed across multiple servers worldwide, reducing latency by serving content from the nearest server to the user.
On the back end, ask your developers to minimize heavy scripts and use efficient, clean code—as both of these elements can greatly impact page speed.
Practice A/B testing
A/B testing is an invaluable method for testing variations of landing page elements like headlines, images, and CTA buttons. The goal is to identify the most effective combinations that drive conversions.
With these tests, you randomly direct half of your incoming traffic to version A of your landing page, while the other half sees version B.
By measuring how each version performs against a specific goal (e.g. conversion rate), you can statistically determine which variation is more successful.
Note, A/B testing isn’t a once-and-done thing. It’s a continuous process that allows you to refine and improve the user experience over time.
Common mistakes to avoid when creating a landing page
Along with implementing best practices, you’ll also want to avoid some all-too-common landing page mistakes. Here’s what to be wary of.
Overloading the page with information
With landing pages, your mantra should be “less is more.” While it’s tempting to include as much information as possible to educate and persuade visitors, overloading your page with content can overwhelm visitors, making it difficult for them to focus on the essential message or CTA.
Including weak or confusing CTAs
A weak CTA can undermine an otherwise impressive and compelling landing page. Be conscious of both the text you use and the colors you choose.
For example, a confusing or ambiguous CTA like “Click Here” can leave visitors unsure about what they’re committing to or what will happen next. Similarly, CTAs that are visually unappealing or bland may fail to capture attention and evoke action.
Ignoring visual hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is an undervalued element of landing page design that makes all the difference. It refers to the process of guiding your visitors toward conversion by harnessing the power of page layout.
Here are some of the fundamental do’s and don’ts of visual hierarchy:
Do’s
- Stick to a consistent font family for headings, subheadings, and body text to maintain readability and coherence.
- Organize content logically, with plenty of white space around elements to improve readability and guide users’ eyes smoothly from one section to the next.
- Choose a harmonious color palette that reflects your brand, and use contrasting colors to emphasize important elements like CTAs.
Don’ts
- Don’t use a mishmash of fonts or varying font sizes without a clear hierarchy—this can create visual chaos.
- Don’t scatter elements randomly across the page.
- Don’t use mismatched colors. Poor color choices or inconsistent color schemes can make your landing page look disjointed.
Create more effective landing pages with Bitly Pages
Landing pages are strategic marketing tools that can help your business generate leads, gather information, and even encourage more sales. However, not all landing pages are created equal—you’ll need to incorporate best practices like using simple forms, effective CTAs, and A/B testing to create pages that meet your goals.
Thankfully, creating high-converting landing pages using all of these best practices doesn’t necessarily require lots of work or a big budget. With Bitly Pages, you can simplify the landing page process. Our easy-to-use toolkit empowers you to create beautiful, high-converting landing pages in just minutes—with all the data and analytics you need to track engagement.
Ready to elevate your landing pages to new heights? Get started with Bitly today and see how easily Bitly Pages can transform your landing page strategy!
