Landing page design of a website is very important from business point of view. It’s so critical that it can be a decisive factor on whether you will remain in business or not.

Read this. On an average a visitor takes less than 5 seconds to decide to stay in the page or close the browser window / press the back button. It means in 5 seconds or less a landing page has to impress its visitors so that they may stay longer.

How can you do this?

There are some basics that webmasters need to follow when they design landing pages. These simple basics are tested many times and found to be good. However please understand that some may work and some may not work for your landing page. With time you will be able to optimize landing page for the best results.

Best practices for a good landing page design:

1) Keep your landing page neat: A clustered looking page just does NOT work. Let the landing page be simple and neat to look at. Don’t fill every nook and corner of the page with graphics and icons etc. Just one or two images are enough. Not more than one video if you want to use. Two or three paragraphs about the offer, service and/or product will suffice. Let there be space in between stuff – let your landing page breath.

2) Great Headline: Once the visitors get the overall feel of a page, they look for the headline. Remember the headline is the most important factor of the page. A visitor if impressed with the design will read the headline and decide whether to go ahead or press the back button. You will be surprised to know there are professionals who charge thousands of dollars just to write a headline. The headline is so important.

If you have money then let a professional write the headline (and content too) of your landing page. But if you cannot afford it, you can write it yourself or ask one of your friends good at content writing to write for you.

You will find good headline writing tips online. I suggest you use words like how, why, know, learn etc. they work well on headlines. Read my article to know why these words work well in headlines and content?

Follow your headline with a great sub-head too if you are using one.

Make sure the headline is complimenting the Ad you had written to advertise your site. If you ad says something and headline something else, then even if your headline is the best in the world – it won’t work.

3) Meaningful Copy: What follows after headline is the copy. After design it’s the headline, and after that it’s your page copy. Again there are professionals who can write the copy for you. Don’t worry (and surprisingly) copy writers charge less than headline writers. You will find many good content writers who write a 300 word copy for 10 dollars.

It is advisable if you get your copy written by pros, but again if you can’t afford, do it yourself. But make sure you are writing to the point and your copy is NOT distracting your visitor from the offer.

What should be in copy? Well I can write a different post on this but in short write the benefits your product or service can offer to the buyer. Writing benefits has been proved to be the best method of writing copy to convert a visitor to a customer.

4) Call to Action: The call to action should be clearly visible on the page. It’s best to keep call to action in two or three palaces in the page. One should be above the fold and one at the bottom of the page.

Make sure the call to action is on the page itself. It’s very irritating for the visitor if you tell them to click and then respond to call to action. I can understand that sometimes call to action is difficult to be kept on the same page, for example an ecommerce site has a lot of products where visitors can choose many products and then buy.

In such cases it best to keep at least one call to action on the page. For example using cookies to keep track of products kept in the cart (you must have seen many sites like these), or asking for email to make sure you can send them reminders in case they do not buy etc.

The idea is let your user take some action on the page before they leave the page/site.

5) Less Navigation: Let there be only basic navigation on this page. Too many links will only distract the visitor.

6) Trust and Security: If you can show some legitimate trust and security icons on the landing page it can work in your favor. Visitors feel comfortable buying from a site that ensures safety of their credit card number or any other private information they leave in the site.

7) Address and Phone No.: Presence of your physical address and a phone number where the customers can contact you will boost confidence of your visitors and they are more likely to buy a product from you.

These are some tips that you can follow for a good landing page design. However please understand that landing page design is different from landing page optimization.

Landing page optimization is done by testing the landing pages as this is the only way to know what works and what doesn’t for that particular landing page. Also note that if something works for a landing page its no guarantee that it may work for your page as well.

I have tried to help my site’s visitors know some basic landing page design concepts that have worked well for many advertisers. If you are using pay per click to get visitors then these tips are even more useful.

Please let me know what you feel about this article. Is there anything I can add/change to help my visitors?