How to Build a Landing Page in WordPress

You can either build a WordPress landing page yourself using a customized page template or by installing a specialized landing page builder plugin.

What a lot of people don’t know is that you can build great landing pages for your WordPress site without having to break the bank by hiring services from lead generation and marketing companies.

You can even create a landing page yourself in less than 10 minutes. We’ll show you how.

First things first, let’s cover the basics of landing pages.

Why Should I Build a Landing Page?

Because they convert. A landing page is essentially the entry point to your site. A great landing page will grab a visitor’s attention and persuade them to take a desired action: perhaps you want them to sign up for your email list, download a brochure, buy a product, etc. Whatever the goal, a good landing page is always focused towards that goal.

Just to make sure that you understand, let’s look at the difference between a landing page and the homepage of a site: a landing page is focused on a specific goal or objective while your main homepage has a broad objective. The aim of a landing page is to take your visitors through a specific marketing journey while the main homepage allows visitors to decide on their own journey through your site.

Anyone can tell you that you don’t really need a landing page to get a visitor to take a specific action. You can actually make them take the desired action on your homepage.

BUT, with a good landing page you will achieve a higher conversion rate because it is very specific in its goal. A homepage has a lot of information and elements that may distract a user from taking the desired action.

So, are you ready to build one? Here are several ways to build landing pages in WordPress.

Building a Custom Page

Building a custom page within WordPress is the old-fashioned approach. You would simply just build a custom page template on any theme you have; and do whatever you need to in the template.

The easiest way to build a custom page template in WordPress is to copy the default page PHP template and edit CSS and HTML components to get the desired design or structure.

Using Plugins to Build Landing Pages

Plugins are the best way to go if you do not want to worry about dealing with code.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many free landing page builder plugins out there. And the few free ones often have in-plugin purchases or limited features. There is, however, one free plugin that has all the features you need to build a functional landing page in WordPress. It’s among the top landing page plugins (see below).

WordPress Landing Pages

WordPress Landing Pages is an easy-to-use plugin that has all the basic features you need to build a functional landing page. It has a fair selection of templates, allows you to split test (a/b testing) your landing pages, as well as to track and measure conversions.

The WordPress Landing Pages plugin is fully integrated in the Theme Builder and allows you to quickly customize any elements you like.

The WordPress Landing Pages plugin is fully integrated in the Theme Builder and allows you to quickly customize any elements you like.

All in all, it is a good option if you are on a budget and don’t want to invest in a more functional landing page plugin at the moment.

Thrive Landing Pages

Thrive Landing Pages has a drag & drop editor that makes it extremely easy to create and edit landing pages. It comes with over 140 templates (some themed) for you to choose from. The great thing about the plugin is that the landing pages are combined in sets to provide a consistent user experience. That means that the opt-in page, “thank you” page and confirmation pages in a particular set have the same feel and don’t provide random experiences.

Leadpages

Leadpages is actually an online landing page builder – we’ll be addressing it more thoroughly down below – with a plugin for WordPress. It has a centralized editor and your landing pages are hosted on Leadpages servers. The best thing about Leadpages is that you can easily and quickly create or publish a landing page. All you need to do is choose a template, customize it (through the drag & drop page builder) and add it to your site.

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is simply a drag & drop page theme builder (another option covered below) that also comes as a plugin. You can easily and quickly create custom layouts and designs – you have around 30 landing pages to choose from.

You can try out the Beaver Builder plugin for yourself at http://demo.wpbeaverbuilder.com/.

You can try out the Beaver Builder plugin for yourself at demo.wpbeaverbuilder.com.

The great thing about Beaver Builder is that you can use your WordPress widgets to add more functionality and bring elements in from your site to your landing pages.

OptimizePress

You’ve probably heard of OptimizePress before – it has been one of the most popular plugins to build landing pages for quite some time. That’s because it offers a wide range of templates and a powerful drag & drop editor to quickly create the landing page you need. Note: the size of the plugin is quite large (29MB).

Theme Builders

As we mentioned earlier, most WordPress themes are quite restrictive when it comes to design and structure. For example, you can customize the primary content block of a page in most themes but you cannot amend the design of anything outside the block. So, if you aim to create a landing page from a theme page template, you would just end up with a new page with the same design as your website – the opposite of a landing page. Unless you build a custom page template (mentioned earlier) or use advanced theme builders.

What advanced theme builders offer are drag and drop builders. They essentially enable you to customize every and any design aspect of any page. The interface is also very easy to use.
There are plenty of great drag & drop theme builders available. A few off the top of my head: Divi, Total, Beaver Builder (its plugin version is recommended above) and Strata.

If you need a variety of landing page templates, it is highly recommended you use this method instead of creating custom theme templates. It will save you time and make your work much easier.

Leadpages

Leadpages is known for creating stunning and functional landing pages. It offers dozens of integrations to help make your WordPress landing page user friendly and attractive. The downside is that it isn’t free: plans start at $36.99 per month.

Leadpages has more than a hundred of templates to choose from that can be added to your site within minutes.

Leadpages has more than a hundred of templates to choose from that can be added to your site within minutes.

What you get is 144+ well-designed templates, a simple editor that enables you to create and publish a stunning landing page in 10 minutes or less and the ability to split test your landing pages.

It’s not a stretch to say that Leadpages is the most popular landing page option. It is actually hard to find a popular blog online that doesn’t use it. Two of the many reasons for it’s popularity is that you do not need to be a designer to use it and all their templates have been tested as effective and high converting templates.

The price may be worth it to you if you want to save time, as the platform is incredibly easy to use.

Wrapping Up

Although WordPress may not be designed to handle landing pages, you can easily create one using either the old-fashioned method of building a custom page template or by using a plugin. Above we mentioned some of the best plugins you can use to build highly functional and attractive landing pages, developer or not.

Choose the method that works best for your business and start collecting, cultivating and converting leads!

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