Options for Creating Landing Pages for Your WordPress Site: Which One is Right for You?

Now that we’ve introduced the concept of landing pages and how they can benefit your business, it’s time to take a look at how you can create one for your WordPress site.

As usual with WordPress, there are a number of options for creating a landing page. These fall into four categories:

1. Doing it yourself
2. Using a free plugin
3. Using a premium tool
4. Hiring a developer

This article examines some of the options available for each of these approaches, and the steps involved, in order to help you decide upon the best solution for your needs and priorities. So if you are ready to start making the most of the traffic to your website, and begin improving the conversion rate of your visitors who become customers or clients, then read on to find out the best way to build a landing page with WordPress!

Create Your Own Landing Page

Taking the DIY approach and creating a landing page without using a plugin can have many benefits, including allowing you to get started straight away, without the need for evaluating, installing, and getting to grips with any new tools or services.

Creating a New Page

Adding a landing page to your site can be as simple as creating a new page and entering persuasive sales copy.

The process for adding a landing page to your site can be as simple as creating a new page, and then entering the sales copy that will answer any of the questions your potential customers or clients might have, while also building a persuasive case as to why they should take the desired action.

Working with Page Templates

Depending on the WordPress theme your site is using, it may well include a page template that will allow you to remove some of the distracting page elements that, while useful on the rest of your site, aren’t ideal for delivering a distraction-free sales message.

From the “Add New Page” screen in WordPress, any existing page templates will be available from the “Page Attributes” options box. If you have a template listed entitled “Full width” or something similar, then applying this template should allow you to create a page that doesn’t include a districting sidebar.

More advanced users could even create their own page template, stripping out other page elements including the navigational aids and header area. However, this approach could end up taking you into territory where you’ll need a developer to get the job done effectively.

Summary:

While the DIY approach can allow you to start your landing page now, you could be missing out on the opportunity to truly build an effective landing page without compromising due to a lack of time or technical abilities.

Free Landing Page Plugins

As with most features, WordPress offers a selection of plugins for creating landing pages for your business website.

Installing a landing page builder plugin can make adding a high-converting page to your website much easier and less time-consuming. Plugins can also allow the page to visually stand out from the rest of the content on your site, allowing you to design for impact without being constrained by your site’s WordPress theme and its existing page templates.

Free Plugins to Consider

Some free landing page plugins for WordPress to consider include:

• WordPress Landing Pages: the best free option. Also includes a visual editor and allows you to compare conversion rates for different page designs
• Parallax Gravity: includes a visual editor for building the page layout and adding call-to-action buttons
• Impact Template Editor: create or edit existing WordPress page templates for any type of page, including landing pages

These plugins can get you closer to what you’re looking for, and they integrate with WordPress by default. (WordPress integration is often an afterthought with the premium offerings, which tend to be standalone products.)

However, you’ll be stuck learning an entirely new interface—and relative to premium offerings, the interface won’t look as good or work as smoothly. WordPress Landing Pages is good, but doesn’t really have anything gorgeous at its disposal; there’s a lot of Arial and gray, blocky layouts, even in its paid templates.

Summary:

If you’re going to get one of these plugins, get WordPress Landing Pages. It can be a good choice, but it’s not quite as professional or user-friendly as some of the paid options.

Premium Landing Page Options for WordPress

If you want even more features and options for creating your landing pages, these paid plugins and services will interest you:

• OptimizePress – includes a landing page creation wizard to walk you through the setup process and also includes many editable templates for creating all types of landing pages. Starts at $97.
• LeadPages – standalone service that creates landing pages that can be added to WordPress sites. Starts at $37 per month.
• UnBounce – another standalone service that offers a lot of polish and easy editing, although the editor (like any “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” editor) can get frustrating. Starts at $49 per month (after a 30-day free trial)

If you’re interested in a deep comparison of these paid services, check out this article that offers a really detailed and fair look at the tradeoffs.

Summary:

These premium options aren’t cheap; however, they do have a more polished finish than the free plugins, and also offer a lot more features that will allow you to build great-looking and effective landing pages for use on your WordPress site.

Custom Landing Page Development

This is the best way to ensure high quality. You can have a designer/developer create a landing page from scratch using your existing site layout as inspiration, or simply build you a landing page using a number of landing page templates out on the web. If you’ve really got a budget, talk to professionals who specialize in landing pages exclusively—they do exist!

This is the way to get the best result overall, and relative to ongoing monthly subscription fees, it may be the right choice for your business.

Your developer will need to do quite a bit right: integration with your email list (for landing pages that intend to capture emails), proper use of Google Analytics for A/B testing and conversion tracking, and good, clean design and development. But this is the way to get the best result overall—and relative to the ongoing monthly subscription fees of some premium solutions, it may be the right choice for your business.

Summary:

This is likely to be the most expensive option (at least initially), but will get you the highest-quality and most customized result. Consider this if you have a budget and think your landing page could stand to bring your business a lot of value.

Conclusion

Although a landing page can be built by simply using a regular WordPress page, if you do want to convert as much traffic as possible (and you do!), then creating an optimized sales page is one of your best options. We’ve presented the pros and cons of the approaches above. Which one turned out right (or wrong) for you? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!