How to Create a WordPress Landing Page in No Time

WordPress is known to be a great CMS platform you can build your site on. But rarely do people see WordPress as an easy-to-use tool for building landing pages. Landing pages don’t go well with WordPress, but it doesn’t mean there are no workarounds. Unfortunately, you can’t just go to a WordPress dashboard and build a beautiful landing from scratch. This article will show you the main methods you can use to create landing pages that will be just as stunning as your main website.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a page where you direct visitors to with the goal of getting them to make a purchase, subscribe to an email, click a link, or do some other activity. A landing page can be an introduction to your site, product or service. It can also be a separate – more salesy – version of your main site.

When someone creates a landing page, they pursue a certain goal, as opposed to creating a visually appealing website without a defined purpose.

How is a landing page different from a website page?

A website and landing page are two different online assets. As mentioned earlier, a landing page has a goal and this goal almost always implies making a visitor perform some sort of action. A website page also has a goal, but instead of promoting action-oriented behavior, a website page permits mindless browsing, information research, and deep analysis.

For example, a company website may contain such information as company description, product benefits, company location, and contacts, as well as a registration form and call-to-actions. All these elements are crucial to customer understanding of the brand, but they don’t necessarily push the user toward action. Even though call-to-actions are present on the main website, you can also find plenty of redundant information there which doesn’t help with the sales process. Still, this seemingly unnecessary at first glance information allows the user to form a comprehensive understanding of the company and its offerings.

Unlike a website page, every element of a landing page has a set goal. The sequence of elements and each element itself are dedicated to achieving that goal. Every element that doesn’t serve a common purpose is ruthlessly eliminated while elements that move the visitors closer to the goal are emphasized and highlighted. So if you want visitors to do something on a website, consider creating a landing page that is characterized by the following:

• it has a structure similar to a sales funnel
• it doesn’t contain any information that doesn’t serve the goal
• it doesn’t have a footer
• it gets to the point right away

How to create a landing page in WordPress

1. Plugins

Plugins can be an easy and inexpensive way to create landing pages in WordPress. There are plugins for everything nowadays and landing pages are not an exception. However, plugin developers also have to earn money so most plugins are free but you do need to pay for premium features once you start using the plugin. Try WordPress Landing Pages plugin which has most basic features and is pretty easy to use.

Plugins are probably the easiest way to create a landing page, but free plugins are also incredibly difficult to find. So read on to the method 2.

2. Theme builder

Unlike a regular WordPress theme, a theme builder allows you to change the positioning and visual style of the elements as you like. In a theme builder you’re still restricted by certain limits (you can’t just design something out of your head without knowing the code) but still, a theme builder gives you a lot more customization options compared to a regular WordPress theme.

Remeber, that theme builder is still a theme only it offers you more creative freedom by integrating a drag and drop functionality into a theme. Unfortunately, not every theme out there has a drag and drop functionality. So if you know you’re going to need a lot of landing pages along with standard company site, make sure you chose the right theme from the very begining.

3. LeadPages templates

If you want a truly custom solution, LeadPages might be exactly what you need. LeadPages often offers free HTML versions of landing pages that can be found on their website. The trick is to download a template and make it WordPress compatible since the template is pure HTML and not a theme. If you know a bit of code you can still make an HTML template work in WordPress. You do this by editing the code at the very top of the template, renaming the index.html file, changing the path to every external file, and editing the PHP file. It all might sound like a lot of work, but in the end, you’ll get a unique beautiful landing page, so it’s worth it.

4. Build a landing page

You can always forgo the three methods mentioned earlier and build a template manually. Of course, this is a very expensive and time-consuming option but it still remains popular. The thing is that a neatly designed landing page can become a gold mine for the business, so creating a landing page that works might be a great investment.

To build a landing page from scratch hire a designer and a front-end and back-end developer. Or do it yourself if you have the necessary skills. With a custom landing page, you really take full control of your sales cycle and how the landing works and performs.

Conclusion

Landing pages have become such an indispensable part of doing business online, that almost every business nowadays does marketing through landing pages. A landing page serves a specific purpose – usually making a sale or getting people leave their contact details. While WordPress as a CMS isn’t intended for the landing page creation, it’s still possible to design a landing page in WordPress. You can create a landing page in WordPress using any method from the four methods listed above, but apart from choosing a method consider identifying a single goal a landing page is intended to achieve, and before you start designing, make a sketch of a landing page structure – a structure that slowly but surely moves the visitors toward the goal.