What are the Characteristic Features of a Failed Landing Page?

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is the first page of a website that the user lands on when s/he opens the site. It is also known as a lead capture page or a destination page because it is what the user sees when s/he looks up the website on any search engine. The result that the search engine fetches in response to the search is the landing page of the website. When a website is promoted, it is this page that shows up in online advertisements and various other promotions.

Why is Landing Page Important?

A landing page is the first thing that a visitor sees of any website. It is the one thing that can make or break the reputation of a brand or company. If the landing page can successfully impress the visitors, they are highly likely to stay on and check out the rest of the website. On the other hand, a poorly done landing page can create a wrong impression, and the user may not visit again.

Here Are Some Reasons Why It is So Important:

It Can Generate Leads: Why would you want your website to have more and more visitors? Why is it important to generate traffic? The simple answer is that the more the number of visitors, the higher the possibility of lead conversion. But this is only true for a website that satisfies the viewers. The landing page can help convert visitors to leads who may eventually become long-term customers who will commit to your site.

It Can Be Used for Analysing Data: Analysing valuable user data can help you understand how engaging your content is for them, why they visit your website and which aspects are not appealing to them. By doing this, it is possible to work on a website that engages more people and caters to what they want on the site. And the landing page, along with the various features and elements on it, can help to do this.

It Tells the User What to Do: A landing page prompts the user to act on your site. If you want them to visit a particular section, you can do so with your landing page, so they visit that section first before they check out anything else. It is essential to prevent them from getting distracted by the other elements of the page and helping them to focus. By doing this, you can control where they spend the maximum amount of time.

It Prompts Decision Making: The landing page prompts the user to make a decision before they leave the site. It is what makes them sign up for promotional emails, download items, or make a purchase. It is helpful for many users who often do not know what to do on the site, and so they are directed to a specific action.

It Helps to Optimise the Site: Your website should perform its best so that it features on popular search engines and brings in more people. To ensure such optimal performance, you can use the landing page to test out which of the elements you should retain on your site and those that you should remove.

Despite how important a landing page is, it often fails to capture the viewers’ attention. It reduces views on a website and also causes companies to lose out on both existing and potential customers. And this generally happens because of a failed landing page.

What are the Features of a Failed Landing Page?

Creating a landing page is not easy. It requires planning as well as a keen sense of judgment that will help you determine what can make the page look good. Here are some common mistakes that Web designers to hire make and what you can do to avoid them:

Large Images: Images not only take up space but also affect the time it takes for a website to load. Quite often, landing pages do not succeed because of large size images that decrease the load time of the site. Sometimes the images continue to load even after the page has loaded. Users do not have the time to wait for a page to load, and when either the page or its images fail to load quickly, they also leave the site immediately. Further, large images are also often poor quality images and fail to serve the purpose for which they are used.

To fix this problem, reduce the size of the images before putting them on the page. Ensure that they are optimized and do not affect the speed at which the page loads. Further, reduce the number of images you put on a single page and ensure that they load at the same time instead of loading individually.

Slow Page Speed: Sometimes, landing pages take too much time to load. It is not just because of large images or the addition of too many features on a page. There are other factors, as well. One such factor is web hosting. Web hosting is as crucial as the website itself. If web hosting services are weak, they can slow down the pages of a website.

Further, shared hosting plans also contribute to reduced speed. Another reason why it happens is due to poorly written codes that are not clean or organized. That is why not checking a website’s speed while developing it is bad for the site and not just for its landing page.

To fix this problem, check your website speed and page loading speed at the time of development. You can check it either by downloading external plugins and extensions or by using the ones that come with the framework on which the site is built.

Unclear CTA: A call to action button is what converts visitors to leads because the visitors are made to perform a particular action on a site. However, more often than not, landing pages fail because they do not have a clear CTA. The same thing applies to forms. These elements are either not visible to the users or are put in such a way that they cannot be recognized or distinguished. It is the designer’s fault and a sign of bad design aesthetics.

To fix this problem, ensure that you place your call to action or CTA button in a place where it is visible to the viewers. It should stand out from everything else that you put on the screen. Make use of captions that will make people click and intrigue them to know more.

Too Many Redirect Links: Redirect links are generally considered SEO friendly. They are used to redirect the users from one section to another. Putting them on the landing page can be beneficial, but more often than not, landing pages fail because they have too many of these links. Unnecessary redirect links can be annoying for the viewers. It may also be another reason why your website speed is so low.

To fix this problem, simply reduce the number of redirect links you add on a single page. When you put them, analyze for yourself how you would feel about clicking on those links. If you feel like you are losing interest after a point, rest assured your user will feel so too.

Cluttering: Many designers and developers tend to put all the vital information on a single page, which is the landing page. While it is essential to inform and educate the viewers about the site through this page, putting too many elements on it can be confusing for them. It is not soothing for the eyes and makes the page look cluttered. Sometimes it also distracts the users from the purpose for which they visit the site. It does not call them to action.

To fix this problem, ensure that you break up the number of elements you have and put them in separate pages. A good designer is always able to distinguish between an aesthetically pleasing page and one that is cluttered. Do not put irrelevant materials on a page. Further, make sure that each page caters to only a single aspect, and every other element on the page should be directly related to that aspect.

Too Little Information: While cluttering is terrible for a landing page, too little information is also equally harmful. When the page does not adequately inform the users, it fails to educate them about the site and also fails to satisfy them. Further, many landing pages have forms and subscriptions buttons, but the users are not told why they must subscribe to the company, why they must fill up a certain form or, in some cases, why they have to pay for specific content. Landing pages like this usually have lower subscription rates.

To fix this problem, check all the information you have added once you have finished your work. If it fails to provide complete information to you and you feel like you would like to know more, it means you have not added everything you should have added. You need to add something more.

Not Enough Landing Pages: If landing pages are few, they cannot cater to the needs of all the audience. Some businesses fail to attract customers because they try to fit in all the information on a single page or only a few pages that fail to appeal to everyone. They are unable to cater to the specific needs that viewers have specifically because of the lack of landing pages.

To fix this problem, first ensure that you know the individual needs of all your targeted customers. Then work on putting them on different pages instead of a single page. Adding more than one landing page will not harm your website as long as they have meaningful, audience directed content.

The importance and necessity of landing pages on the website often make it challenging for a web developer to work on these pages. But knowing what to put and what to avoid can be beneficial and can make the work more engaging and efficient. The results are sure to be productive.