What is a landing page? What are the differences between a landing page and a home page? What is the easiest way to create a landing page in WordPress? Here are the answers to those questions and more.
Landing Page vs. Home Page
A landing page means exactly what the name suggests: it’s the page where your visitors land. Most of the time it’s the home page, but it could be other pages as well. But one distinctive difference between the two is that a landing page usually has the purpose of grabbing visitors’ attention and persuading them to do something. Most popular actions that a landing page wants a visitor to do are subscribe to an email list, buy a product, click a link/button, or share something to social media. Unlike the usual homepage, a landing page doesn’t let visitors wander around looking for something to do. A landing page is also a single-purpose static page, opposed to a multi-purpose home page that is usually dynamic. That’s why, to be able to achieve the goal, a good landing page should have:
a simple structure and minimalistic design no distracting sidebars no footer a minimal header to bring visitors straight to the copy
How to Create a Landing Page
There are several ways to create a landing page within WordPress.
You can use a pre-made landing page theme. There are free and paid options that you can install and use right off the bat, but going in this direction will usually limit you expanding the website later. And you will be stuck with the theme forever. If you are good with design, HTML, and CSS, you can build your own landing page template. The rest of us can move on to the next options. Those who want to have a quick solution that is theme-independent can use one of the many available WordPress plugins to create a landing page on your site. One option that is both free and functional is WordPress Landing Pages. Another option is to use drag and drop page builder plugins. If you feel adventurous and would like to create a landing page that fits your exact needs, you can use this route to rearrange the page elements according to your preferences. There are many such plugins; most of them are either not free or not fully-functional. There’s an exception to the rule: Page Builders by SiteOrigin is both free and powerful. Combine it with the free SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle to add more power.
Using Page Builders to Create Your Landing Page
You can use any one of the options above for your landing page. But let’s have fun and try Page Builders by SiteOrigin. Start by installing the plugin from your WordPress “Plugins -> Add New” sidebar menu.
After activating the plugin, continue with creating a new page using the “Pages -> Add New” menu.
The plugin will add a new “Page Builder” tab next to the standard “Visual” and “Text” tabs. Choose the Page Builder tab to start your journey.
The basic work flow of using this plugin is to add rows, divide and resize the rows to your needs, and fill in the rows with widgets that you need. By using the combination of rows and widgets, and by arranging and rearranging the widgets (you can drag and drop them), you can create virtually any layout and any content on your page.
If you’ve installed the SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle along with Page Builder, you’ll have tons of customizable widgets in your arsenal. The most commonly-used widget is the “SiteOrigin Editor” that you can use to enter text. There are also Slider, Image, Buttons, and more useful widgets.
You can edit, duplicate, delete, and move the widgets around. Go wild. Use the Visual Editor to edit the page in real time. After you are done with the customization, hit “Save Draft” to save your work or “Publish” if you are ready to share it with the world. For more information about using the Page Builder, you can refer to its documentation.
Spicing Up and Beyond
After you finish creating your landing page, you can enhance it further by adding cool buttons and other symbols using Shortcodes Ultimate, and integrating it with pop-ups, call to actions, and other notifications to build email lists using Icegram. But those are stories for another time. Have you tried building your own Landing Page in WordPress? What method do you use? Share your experience using the comments below.
