How and Why of Landing Pages in WordPress

The Perfect Landing Page for Realtors
When someone says “Landing Page” do you know what they mean?
Landing Page means that you create a specific page where a visitor comes to a specific page on your WordPress site which makes it the entry point to your main site.
The main purpose of Landing Pages is to take your visitor to a predefined page the convinces them to take a certain action. Most cases (especially on Realtor® sites) it is about getting contact information and developing a lead or customer.
In other words, the goal here is to take that new visitor and immediately put them through some marketing process on your WordPress site, as opposed to letting them wander around, looking for something to do.
How can you make your Landing Page in WordPress special?
Of course, you don’t need something like a Landing Page to try convincing your visitors to do something. You can do it on any page that can be built inside the WordPress platform or even from the homepage of the site itself.
However, the difference here is that a Landing Page (when executed properly) will always bring better results, due to its single-purpose nature, as opposed to a standard homepage which is usually built in a way that tries to present a load of different things and information.
The most interesting thing about Landing Pages is their design, or more accurately, lack thereof. Most Landing Pages in WordPress, at least in a way that they’re implemented these days, are very minimalistic. They are usually built entirely separately from the rest of the site and retain very little of the site’s original design.
In short, every element that appears on a Landing Page should reinforce the main goal of the page (getting the visitor to take a specific action), and everything else should be erased.
In summary, the elements that make a good Landing Page in WordPress, and also the elements that we’ll focus on in this post are:
- Simple structure with minimal design.
- No sidebars. Sidebars make the design distracting.
- No footer.
- Minimal header. The visitor can get straight to the copy.
- If you’re going to use a logo, make it so it is not linked to another site.
Method #1: The Obvious One – Plugins
There’s a plugin for everything these days and Landing Pages in WordPress are no exception here. If you want a quick way of building Landing Pages in WordPress, and you don’t care that much about optimizing code, then plugins are where you should go.
There’re not much free Landing Pages available. Sure there are some plugins in the official directory, but you will quickly find out that they are either very limited in terms of features or even that there’s almost nothing available for free and that you have to do some kind of an purchase in order to get the actual features.
Anyway, the only free and functional plugin I could find is WordPress Landing Pages. It’s quite easy to use and has all the basic features you’d need to start building Landing Pages in WordPress.
Method #2: Drag and drop theme builders
The whole idea of constructing a Landing Page on a WordPress site is to make it different from all the other pages. But the problem with most WordPress themes is that they are quite limited in terms of what you can and cannot do with the design.
For instance, every theme will allow you to place whatever you want inside the main content block of a page template. However, if you want to do something outside of this area, well, bad luck.
So what’s different about drag and drop builders that are integrated into some of the more developed themes out there is that you can basically do whatever you wish with any page’s design, and this sort of customization is available through a very easy to use interface.
In a nutshell, the advice is this, if you’re working on a site that you know is going to require a handful of Landing Page templates for WordPress to be created along with the main design, consider switching to a drag and drop builder altogether. It will likely make your work a lot faster.
Method #3: Manually Built Custom Pages
This method provides the best SEO and gives you better information on how your advertising campaigns are working. For instance, If you were to do a WordPress Multi-Site using Sub-Domains and set up a new sub-domain for each of your landing pages, the search engines would view these as a separate site from your main site. So basically, each sub-domain would be a separate website with a custom landing page. Then you advertise that domain and using AdWords you would get information on how well that advertisement is working.
If you need web hosting or web development work, please contact Tom Ashworth today! This is an advanced topic and if you are interested in how it works give me a call at (208)830-7991.