Building an effective landing page

The quality of a landing page can undoubtedly make or break a campaign. You should be looking to publish a page that is beautifully designed, expertly written and unlikely to encourage users to abandon before it can even finish loading.

Here are 4 solid tips to follow when it comes to launching an agile landing page:

1. Avoid overloading the page with visuals. As a general design rule a page that relies on a handful of small objects will load faster than a page that uses lots of large objects. A well-designed landing page shouldn’t be be overloaded with gigantic, obtrusive imagery. If your landing page is responsive, use different images for different viewports rather than rescaling one large image for all. That way, those visiting via mobile won’t waste precious time or bandwidth downloading unnecessarily large images. Deploying interactive video is a great way of making landing pages more engaging. However, these files tend to be even bigger than images, and if you make your users wait for them to load before they can settle down and explore, you risk losing them altogether. A simple solution is to load a handy placeholder image in the window for the video. Visitors will then see a ‘finished’ page even if the file is still loading in the background.
2. Don’t stick to the same page structure as your main site. When building a standalone landing page, you don’t need to worry about loading every resource. Instead, focus on loading the resources you need to make the page work. Consider inlining resources in the HTML – this means including them in the main HTML file, rather than loading them as separate files. If the HTML includes all the CSS it needs to display the page, the browser has to make fewer requests and users get to see the page sooner.
3. Prepare for an influx of users. So, you’ve tested your landing page a million times internally, and it seems to be loading quickly, but what happens when thousands of users try to access the page at the same time? All systems behave differently under heavy load, so it’s crucial to have an idea of how many people are likely to visit your landing page at any one time, and how you’ll respond when they do. It is always worth conducting a load test – subjecting the page to increasing levels of traffic under controlled conditions to see just how it will behave when the the page goes live.
4. Avoid using third-party redirects. Depending on the nature of your campaign, tracking can involve routing customers through a third-party site before redirecting them to your landing page. This gives you valuable data, but invariably adds a delay. If you’re able to do so, it’s a good idea to cut out the middle man. This doesn’t mean you’ll miss out on the data, you just need to be a little bit more astute when it comes to collecting and reporting.

Performance can be easy to overlook during the planning phase if you’re unsure what exactly to look for. But if you don’t test and prepare accordingly, a landing page that seems to be running smoothly during set-up can often slow down or fail completely under live conditions, so it’s important to follow the right steps from the outset.

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