7 Foundational Landing Page Best Practices

Landing pages are an extremely important part of any digital marketing campaign. Whether it’s paid advertising or not, but especially for paid advertising. It’s the place that your customers are going to engage with your business online, and likely where they’re going to decide whether to purchase from you or not.

So it’s important that you make sure that it’s actually putting your business in a good light, it’s giving a good user experience. One of the questions we get asked pretty often is what should I put on my landing page, or what makes a good landing page? So rather than rehash the same thing over and over again, even though probably still have to do it from time to time on client calls.

I wanted to put together a video that talks about the main fundamentals of what a good landing page are, and then I want to give some real-world examples to show you some of those pieces out in the wild.

For the majority of this video, I’m actually going to use real-world landing page examples. I have two different business types that I’m going to walkthrough. The first is going to be meal prep kits, so I have three different sites for that.

The second is going to be a stock screener, something for the stock market, it’s in the financial space. It’s just a very different look and feel than the meal kit delivery system. So we’ll have a couple of different things we can look at, and I’ve got three businesses for each.

So as we go through these best practices, I’m going to be calling them out based on the landing pages I have chosen. That doesn’t mean these are perfect landing pages and you should absolutely follow everything they do, but it also doesn’t mean they’re bad.

They have some things they’re doing well, some things they’re not doing as well, but hopefully, it’ll give you ideas for what to do on your pages.

The first landing page best practice I want to talk about is having a focused header section, and let’s start off with the meal prep kits for this. Here, I’m on the hello fresh site and I am on a 13-inch MacBook. This is what it looks like above the fold, header section for a 13-inch laptop.

Overall, the header section here is pretty good. You can see that the call to action is pretty much the same as the intro here, get 14 free meals plus free shipping, and then there’s a little bit of content that says fresh pre-portioned ingredients and delicious recipes delivered to your door.

So obviously, they want you to get started, personalize your plan. One thing that I don’t see here is that when I searched for this to bring up this ad as well as the other meal kits, I actually did Google meal prep kit, and that doesn’t really have anything listed on this page for that, but it is still a pretty compelling header section.

Blue apron is somewhat similar, it just starts off with choose your menu, don’t worry you can change your menu every week, and then it just goes into the first section of meal prep kits that you can have here. There’s not really a lot that reinforces the meal prep kit keywords, but it does take you directly to calls to action. So not necessarily a hugely compelling header section, but it’s not terrible.

Then green chef is probably the one that does the least good job in my eyes because it just kind of starts you off in the builder process. It doesn’t really set you on a landing page at the very top that is telling you why you’re here.

You’re kind of immediately thrown into making a decision about what you want, rather than why you should choose green chef over blue apron or hello fresh. So all of these meal prep kit landing pages right off the bat don’t necessarily have header sections that I would consider more traditional, but the stock pages do.

So here we’ve got three different versions, so this first one from Benzinga is a stock screener landing page, these will all be stock screeners. But it’s got the only stock screener you need, a couple of calls to action, and then even on this same piece, you can start to see some of the supporting content, and you’ve got six calls to action in the beginning section of this page. So it’s got a lot going on here with some supporting information.

Adam has a little bit cleaner version, and it’s got a lot more text, a lot less visuals, but it still does tell you to screen the stock market for your next investment. Tells you what you can do, and then helps you find investment opportunities. Then the last one is even more drastic with just very bold lettering up at the top for sign up for your supercharged super charts and then a call to action. You have to scroll down to get to any additional information on that.

So out of all of these pages, you can see different ways of trying to have compelling header sections, anything from this relatively basic one, into this probably the best layout out of all of these the hello fresh page, that gives you a little bit more information. Or even just dumping somebody right into the sales process like the green chef page does.

Just think about your own user experience, if you were searching for either a meal prep kit or stock screener software, what would you want to have at the top of the page as the first impression? Because odds are, you’re judging these pages based on what you see here from a consumer standpoint but that’s the way you need to look at your own landing pages.

What information would you want right at the top that would tell you that you’re in the right place for your own business? What is the best way to make this first impact as meaningful as possible?

For the second-best practice, we’re going to be engaging with the page a little bit more, and that’s to make sure that you have clear calls to action. When we reviewed the header section, I called out the Benzinga page, because it has six different calls to action.

You can see login, start your free trial up in the header, and then twice, you can see a product demo and get started for free in the black header section, and then on the bottom left in that kind of white background area. You can see those same pieces.

As we engage with the rest of the page, you’ll notice that there is a chat operator over here, to where you can either start to chat, you can either get in touch with sales, tell them you’re just browsing, or you can chat with support. So it’s got a second call to action there.

But for the most part, these product demo and get started for free calls to action are repeated throughout the page. So there’s a good number of different touchpoints you can see here for people to do the same thing. So overall, Benzinga really just wants you to get started.

The atom landing page is a little bit different. First of all, it has this area where you want to sign up for news and special offers, so there’s one call to action there. I’m going to say don’t allow for right now. Let me get rid of the bar at the bottom, and now we can start to see the calls to action here.

You can see the try for free up in the top, find investment opportunities, and then as you scroll down the page, you can see that there’s a good amount of content here, but there’s really not a ton of calls to action throughout the page. It took a little bit before we got to another screen for stocks, now we can start to see create a watch list, then there’s another one down here of track fellow investors.

There’s a lot of different calls to action on this page. These are both learn more, either about SEC filings or an investment portfolio, and then you can get started again down at the bottom. So this one has a number of different calls to action throughout the entire page. It’s not quite as focused as the last landing page that we just looked at, and more often than not, I would say that you should try and keep your calls to action relatively focused.

I don’t have a problem with there being two different types of calls to action here, because effectively, see a product demo is the hand-holding version, whereas get started for free is just let me get started. But there’s not a lot of other things on this page like get a white paper, watch a webinar, sign up for a newsletter, this page is relatively focused on the same thing.

I think that’s a really important note to take away, is that you really want people to be able to take the call to action that you want, and you’re trying to optimize for with these landing pages, so keep it focused. We already looked at this green chef page and talked about how it’s pretty focused on just the call to action here because it’s trying to just get you to get started.

There’s really not a lot else on the page other than just the call to action. So although this one is focused and feels very sales-heavy, that doesn’t mean that you have to drop somebody right into the buyer section to get them to focus on this call to action. If we go to the hello fresh page, there are a number of different calls to action whether it’s this button, the personalize your meal plan.

There are a number of different calls to action throughout the page, a lot of them just say start now. Without giving too much away or taking too much time, every single one of these buttons goes to the same length, even if the language is different.

Although it’s got a lot of supporting information, takes you in a number of different areas, and it might feel like there are a lot of different calls to action, there really aren’t, because they all take you to the same place.

Make sure that you’re focused on at least one main call to action, and maybe just use a couple supporting ones if you think that that’s necessary. I’ve already kind of talked a little bit about the third-best practice, and that’s to make sure that you have good supporting content on your landing pages.

I think I alluded to it mostly on this green chef page, but remember, it’s got this main call to action. But then it’s just got a few different questions down here below. Just a frequently asked questions section, and that’s it. There’s not really a lot of additional information to tell me about green chef before I get started.

Sure, there is a section here that says what makes them different, can you see the recipes, that sort of thing. But from a lot of the other landing pages we’ve seen, you know that this is one of the most sparse pages that’s on here.

I like the blue apron site, because even though the header section is still very call to action focused, if you scroll down past these first four plans here, you can get a decent amount of information about why you should choose blue apron. Gives you kind of these six bullet points here with supporting information.

It’s got some social proof, and there are frequently asked questions down below, and there’s just a lot to kind of help you figure things out. You can also go to the rest of their FAQ page if you want to know more about them.

But then even on some of the stock screening pages, we talked a bit about in the focused header section and this does feel very sparse. But this is also probably the longest landing page that I have pulled up out of the six that I’ve shown you today.

Because as you scroll down, there’s a great gif here that shows you a lot of things that look very overwhelming to me. But I believe for traders who are looking for stock screener software, this is probably very helpful walkthrough of how the platform works. But then if you keep scrolling, it talks about charts that move the market, and then it gives you a little bit more of a view of what those charts could be. We get five different bullet points here about what is useful of the software, and then we really start to get into more pieces.

We’ve got some different supporting information with images and bullet points. There’s a number of other sections here down below that feel relatively similar, that show a number of the different features that this software offers. Then it also shows kind of the idea of some of the reports you can build for yourself.

Again, you keep going down, it keeps showing you more stuff. So there’s lots of information down here to kind of help you figure out why you should or should not use this software. As well as different pieces like social engagement, you saw at the top and there’s also chat.

There’s a lot of really good information on this page that really helps to support the more dramatic introduction to the page when it’s a very sparse header section. But again, I’m still scrolling, I still haven’t gotten to the bottom, there’s that much information on here and it’s got a call to action buried all the way down at the bottom, as well as a couple of supporting calls to action if you wanted to figure that out.

But the main takeaway here is to make sure that whatever you are trying to offer your potential customers, and whatever call to action you want them to sign up for, make sure that the information for them to make the decision to opt-in is on the page because we want to make sure that they have everything they need right away, so they can fill out the call to action and not have to go anywhere else.

The next thing to keep in mind is that page speed matters. Nobody wants to sit around and wait for a landing page to load for a very long time, just to potentially become a customer of yours. It is on you to make sure that your page loads quickly with all the pieces that we just talked about, to make sure that your customers can get the information they need as quick as possible.

My favorite tool for determining page speed is actually Google’s page speed insights tool from Google developers. So if you just go Google page speed insights, it’s the first one that shows up right here. It’s extremely easy to use, all you have to do is add in your landing page. So I’m going to use that one that we just went through the trading view super charts page, and click analyze. Now we can start to see some of the insights that Google has.

This first section at the top, I’ll be honest is new to me, it says discover what your real users are experiencing, and it says that it’s using real user data from the landing page you provided, and if it doesn’t have enough information for the specific URL, it’s utilizing its origin or the root domain as you can see here. This section is a little bit different, but there could be some useful information here.

The part that I find more useful is going to be this diagnose performance issues down here. It’s looking at it just for this URL, and then it gives you an overall score about how quickly your page is loading. So even though this is the longest page we saw and it had all those images on it it’s got a 95, that is a darn good score.

Then it shows you a lot of the different takeaways in the metrics that it has here. So speed index, all the different content pieces. Then the part that I like the best is that it shows you the different areas where you could potentially increase your page speed by properly sizing images.

You can reduce the unused JavaScript, all the way down to different images down here if they don’t have specific code elements, whatever it is. A lot of this is over my head, but this is a very easy thing to copy and paste the URL from this completed report, send it to your developers and say hey, we need to make the landing page quicker, here’s a number of things you could do to execute on that.

The other thing that’s very nice about this report and leads into the next best practice, is that they actually have a section for mobile as well, and it’ll show you the report based on mobile device usage as opposed to desktop. So when we scroll down to the performance issues, here we can see that the performance is only 70.

So it’s not designed as well for a mobile device. It takes a little bit longer for things to load, and then additionally, a lot of the diagnostics and opportunities down here below are going to be different, because of the type of device that somebody is using. So continuing the thought from the mobile report, in page speed insights, the next best practice is to make sure that you’re designing for different devices.

More and more people are using mobile devices as their first touchpoint, even their middle touchpoint, and last touchpoint, potentially the entire thing. So although, many people who are marketers and designers use a laptop or desktop to design things. It’s very important to make sure that the user experience on mobile devices is still up to par.

So definitely take a look at the page speed insights report for mobile devices, but additionally, we need to preview landing pages based on device category. So just for fun, I’m going to keep utilizing this trading view website for this, and then we’ll look at one of the meal prep kits here in just a second. I apologize, the screen is going to be cut off for this, but I’m using chrome as my browser.

So rather than trying to pull up this trading view landing page on my mobile phone, I can actually view it from chrome right here on my laptop. In the main menu for chrome, I just need to go up to view and now you might be able to see this, I need to go down to developer and then choose developer tools.

Now, you can see the preview of the landing page for a mobile device, and then you have a number of different coding pieces over here that can help you troubleshoot and all sorts of things. But the best part is I can see what an iPhone X is going to look like for this landing page without having to leave my computer.

So I can come here and see that it still has a very focused header section, call to action is still there, that gif still works, and then you can preview what the layout is for all the information. So you remember these bullet points were horizontal on my computer, now they are vertical on a mobile device.

So think about all of the different aspects of landing pages and how you want to interact with them. But think about it in terms of a mobile device rather than desktop. Does everything still look good? Does it make sense? Does the information flow? Does it make sense for the landing page to be this long, compared to what the other ones are? Use your best judgment hat on the mobile version as you would desktop.

Here we have the hello fresh version, overall, it looks relatively similar to what I saw on my laptop, pretty easy to scroll through. I would think that you might want a few different calls to action in here, just a little bit more sprinkled throughout because these are back-to-back, and then I bet there’s going to be another one here, yes. You can see that some of the images aren’t really working on here.

So this is probably something where we’ve got some takeaways, we want to make sure that the mobile offer makes a little bit more sense, and the last thing here is that you can preview different devices. So right now, I’m in iPhone X, but you could do responsive, you could also look at a Google Pixel, a nest hub, iPad, whatever device you want to preview, you can have that squared away in here.

The last two best practices that I want to run through, I’m not going to look at the other websites for it, because you don’t really need to look at those pages to see what I’m going to talk about.

Second to last is going to be to track your KPIs, know upfront what metrics you are trying to improve on, and make sure that you have the platform or software in place to track that. Just like with the idea of what should I put on my landing page, a lot of people ask what should I be tracking with my landing pages while I’m testing them?

So here are a number of KPIs that I think can be really helpful. It can be conversion rate, the time on site, scroll depth, bounce rate, the pages viewed, like how many pages somebody viewed during that session, and then average session duration, how long were they on the site?

All of these individually will give you some indicator of how people are engaging with your landing pages, all together they do a pretty good job of telling you whether the user is having a good experience or not, and most of them, you can find for free in the Google analytics profiles.

You can also use additional software whether it is through landing page testing software like un-bounce or Instapage, which we have affiliate links for below if you want to check out either of those. Or if it’s something like heat map software, like hot jar or Microsoft clarity has available, so you can see how users are actually engaging with the page, what they’re clicking on, maybe recording sessions and going back and watching that.

There are lots of different ways that you can track how users are engaging with your page, and making decisions based on where they’re getting stuck, where you’re seeing good flow through, to try and improve and make sure that you’re always moving forward on the KPIs that you’re trying to improve on.

Then the last best practice is super simple, I’m sure you probably already guessed it, it’s to keep testing and iterating your pages.

Landing page testing in my opinion, and in many people’s opinion, is never done, you’re not going to find the landing page that will be the end-all, be-all and will always be the page that you need, so you need to keep testing different layouts, information, calls to action, all these different ways to make sure that you’re improving on what you’ve been doing, you’re learning something with each test and you’re trying to impact the bottom line to make sure that your paid advertising campaigns are bringing in the revenue that they need to.

If you don’t have the ability to go out and hard code new pages, or you don’t have something that makes it easy to test, maybe your developers are overloaded, then you absolutely should check out either un-bounce and/or Instapage like I mentioned in the show notes, and see if either of those pieces of software can help you out.

They are extremely user-friendly, they make testing and iterating super simple for anybody with any knowledge level of building websites, and they help you track performance directly in the platforms.

Depending on what articles you read, videos you watch, experts you speak to, you’ll invariably see a list of landing page best practices that differs from this one. They usually have a number more pieces of information in here, I’ve got a lot more suggestions. But in my experience, this section of best practices is going to be consistent throughout all of them.

You need a page that has very focused header section, good calls to action, and supporting content to make sure that the actual content of the page is meaningful, then from a technical perspective, you need to make sure that you’re designing for all device categories and that those pages are loading quickly because people have less and less patience as the internet gets more advanced. Then it makes no sense to test landing pages if you’re not going to track those KPIs, and test and iterate based on what you’ve learned from those measurements.

Hopefully, this is a good shortlist that feels doable to all of you listening, and hopefully, the examples that I pulled up were also enlightening and gave you some ideas about what you could do on your landing pages, to make sure that you’re following these best practices. Just like always, if you have any follow-up questions or any suggestions as well, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Written by Michelle Morgan