Uptime.com Blog

How to Optimize Landing Pages to Improve Performance

Landing page projects offer an outstanding opportunity to match clarity of purpose to clarity of design and development. The simplest landing pages turn out to be the most effective, and the value of what is being offered to the visitor becomes clear and compelling.

In the dynamic and complex world of web development, it can be challenging to reduce design elements to the minimum. Setting up stand-alone landing pages that respond to a single campaign objective automatically improves the ability to reach only the segment of interest, and makes landing pages simple to design, develop, and test, as well as deliver proven higher conversion rates.

Navigation and Links

There’s a strong case to be made for streamlining navigation elements to reduce distractions, thereby encouraging focus on the desired action: clicking the call to action (CTA) button. In the real world this goal may not be as straightforward as it appears—other priorities, such as branding and maintaining the site’s design consistency, might have to be considered. There’s a similar argument for links—for example, an overabundance of social media links can distract potential customers. You should give mean-and-lean, CTA-focused navigation/link design a chance and test it for its impact on conversion rates.

Only Essential Content

Generally, long pages are frowned upon—following up on the themes of minimalism and removing distractions, why ask for longer reading times and chances to bail? The Amazon product detail pages are usually brought up at this point—don’t they work out well for conversions? Yes, but Amazon has trained its buyers on its particular style and viewers know where to skim and where to look for the very detail or review that might convince them. Certainly, the most important text should be up front and written by people who understand how to communicate the essence of the message. So the best course of action is to test both very crisp and pointed content as well as somewhat longer, more substantive pages.

Forms and Calls to Action

Forms focused on the minimal set of fields, with CTA buttons tightly integrated in the design, have been shown to result in more conversions. Form design can be a thing of beauty—incorporating only clear-cut information necessary to lead the customer to take action. Match the language of the customer rather than just using the first words that come to mind. Test to see if terms used in the form for filling out fields are confusing or redundant.

Properly designed forms will guide the visitor and can even be exciting and interesting. Check out sites for interesting CTA button labels— the boring “Submit” or “Buy” labels are being replaced with more action-oriented language, such as “I’m convinced—sign me up!”

Put web content optimization and overall website performance high on your agenda today! Visit https://uptime.com/ for end-to-end monitoring solutions customized for your site and your industry.

Michael Esposito