How To Create Successful Landing Pages In WordPress

There are many successful marketing tools you can use to increase leads and conversions. However, a landing page – a dedicated web page optimized to capture conversions – is one of the very best methods to improve sales figures.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that creating a custom landing page within WordPress would be difficult. However, given the many plugins available to help you achieve your goal, the process is practically no different than creating regular content for your WordPress site.

In this piece, we’ll look at landing pages in detail. We’ll discuss the best practices you should follow, when to use them, and most importantly, how to create one. Let’s get started!

What is the Purpose of a Landing Page?

The goal of a landing page is to funnel users towards taking a specific action. Visitors to your site usually “land” on a landing page after clicking on an ad or a link from your email marketing campaign.

While the homepage and other areas of your WordPress site likely contain multiple calls to action (links, forms, and chat functions), a landing page is more narrow in scope. There should only be one option to click on, such as “Purchase Now” or “Sign Up.”

Many landing pages contain a contact form or signup form for visitors to enter their information. In return, they’re rewarded with a discount code, download link, or otherwise—and now you have a new lead. (Speaking of sign up form, if one of the personal information collected is email addresses, it’s worth considering to learn how to use MailChimp.)

Landing Page Best Practices

Before you break open your text or visual editor or page builder, it’s worth considering some of the best practices others follow, in order to maximize conversions and move visitors through the sales funnel. It might even be worth keeping a checklist that includes best practices by category for helping to boost conversions on landing pages.

First, it’s important to realize that presentation is crucial. Unlike long-form content found elsewhere on the web, landing page copy should be concise and direct. Also, remember that the page heading should match the anchor text displayed within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

What’s more, every landing page should display a clear Call To Action (CTA). This is ultimately what converts the visitor, and should simply tell them what to do next. It needs to be short and concise, yet highly descriptive – and placed in a prominent location.

Finally, if you’re creating landing pages for paid ads, you should always include content referring to the campaign itself. In addition, the page should be set as noindex, as you won’t want it to be found organically (i.e. through search engines).

Why Create a Landing Page?

Landing pages are primarily used to promote and sell a product or service. The idea is to use one as the entry point to your sales or conversion funnel. Its content should be highly focused, and designed to compel the reader to move through the page. By the end, there should be no other decision than to click on your CTA.

However, landing pages also serve a more analytical function. For instance, they can help put hard numbers to specific campaigns, and give you a basis to track their success. We’ll talk more about goals later on. In short, however, you’ll want to decide whether your goal is to increase leads, sales, product or brand awareness, or simply to educate the reader. This will help you decide how your landing page should be used.

When to Use Long-Form Landing Pages vs. Short-Form Landing Pages

Landing pages come in two basic varieties: long-form and short-form. The former goes into explicit detail about the product or service, and usually includes many different sections. The latter is much more concise. Which one you opt for largely depends on the type of visitor you want to attract.

It’s often said that there are two types of customer: those who want detailed explanations, and those who are turned off by them. In other words, you’ll want to consider whether your audience is mostly likely to respond to a hard or soft sell.

Longer landing pages are more suited a harder sell, and work well for frictionless, direct purchases that offer a ‘quick fix’. This includes pharmaceuticals, training programs, and investment opportunities. In contrast, short pages favor situations where your goals are to generate leads, and you can leave the persuasion to other campaigns.

Setting Goals for Landing Pages

As we mentioned earlier, it’s important to define your goals before you get knee-deep in the creation process. You’ll already have established the goal of the campaign itself (i.e. sales or leads), and you probably have a rough idea of how to create the landing page. However, figuring out how to measure its success can help with the design process down the line.

For example, while there are plenty of methods for setting goals, it’s a good idea to put a number to what you’ll want to achieve and work from there (e.g. 100 leads per month). Creating a dedicated tracking URL will be helpful here, and the analytics you’ll get will let you keep an eye on your progress.

How to Create a Landing Page in WordPress

We’ve talked about how to actually create a landing page over on the Torque blog previously. The exact process you follow will depend on your chosen landing page solution.

However, there are a few things you’ll want to do no matter what:

• Choose a template and settle on a name for your landing page.
• Add a hero image and a CTA.
• Provide information about the offer you’re presenting.
• Include testimonials from other happy customers.
• Outline the cost of the offer explicitly, and potentially discuss how much the customer will save.
• Strip away any superfluous navigation.

While this will give you a good foundation to build on, you’ll also want to consider setting up other pages to help your customers get through the end of the funnel. A Thank You page will be necessary if you’re accepting payments, for example, as will a Checkout page. Adding a noindex tag to the page can also be a smart idea.

Finally, all that’s left is to publish the page and begin dealing with the conversions that come your way!

WordPress Landing Page Plugins

Fortunately, creating a landing page within WordPress is a cinch when using a dedicated plugin, and there are lots of solutions available to choose from:

For example, many page builder plugins offer functionality for creating your landing page. Solutions such as Elementor and Beaver Builder have everything you’ll need to get up and running, although they’re not necessarily dedicated to creating landing pages.

For something more focused, you’ll want to look into options such as Thrive Architect, OptimizePress, or Leadpages:

These tools usually have page builder elements, but also offer features such as ad creation, payment options, and marketing tool integrations. You’ll also find dedicated analytics for calculating metrics such as Return On Investment (ROI).

Get Support for Improving WordPress Landing Pages From WP Engine

If you want to achieve success with your landing page, you’ll need to avoid downtime and technical issues at all costs. Therefore, having a dependable brand behind you is akin to having an extra team member.

Fortunately, choosing a quality host like WP Engine will provide you with rock-solid servers, automatic HTTPS implementation, and 24/7 support to answer any query you have. To find out more about how WP Engine can help you, get in touch today!