Learn How to Create an Effective Landing Page For Startups That Converts

A lot of people may say they know how to build a landing page but can they make an Effective Landing Page? A landing page and website are different. Landing Page is meant for a particular goal, mostly conversions. A website is meant for your holistic brand with many different ideas.

Optimizing landing pages to performance can improve your overall ROI by 10X and more. Check out the below table to see how every 1% conversion rate change can take your marketing ROI to the next level.

So how to optimize the landing page? This blog outlines the methodology we used and the results we achieved which will help you in learning to create an effective landing page for startups. We share the aspects that we optimized and how all of them came together to increase our marketing ROI by 3-4 times. 

Here are the original ads that we ran before optimization and the results we achieved. This campaign was for Ruby on Rails development service.

Fig. Ads before optimization

Fig: Google Adwords Dashboard

As you can see our CTR was around 1-2%. Spending around $1000, we achieved an ROI of 174%. Now, before I share with you the results post optimization, here are the factors that need to be optimized for the landing page.

a. Page Speed: Portent Law says “ Website Conversion Drops 4.42% for every 1 sec additional load time”

Additionally, Google too has announced about page speed and performance to become more important factors on the search engine optimization and ranking algorithms. Hence, first of all, start to work on making your page speed faster. Here is the GT Metrix report on our original page

Fig: GTMetrix report of landing page pre-optimization

You can see many factors in the report, the ones that are most important are the 

• First Contentful Paint
• Largest Contentful Paint

Full load time of your page may not be that important a parameter as there is lazy loading involved on most pages nowadays. We also checked out and removed the additional JavaScript files that were not useful and removed them.

Fig: GTMetrix report of landing page post-optimization

b. Image Optimization

One of the usual suspects of any optimization plan is the images. Images by default are large in size and their size needs to be optimized. Tiny.png is a good tool to quickly change size. If you have a WordPress website, you can use plugins like Smush or ShortPixel. One of the hacks to find problematic images is by using the Download all Images chrome extension that can help you find all images in one place and see through the sizes.

Fig: Download all images plugin interface

c. Improving Speed technically

Once you have the corrections done, the more technical aspects to improve page speed are

• Setting up a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The CDN stores all of your images into multiple servers located in different locations
• Compressing JS
• Caching
• Set rendering Order
• Removing unused scripts/WordPress content
• Changing website host and technology if the backend is a problem

Doing the above changes, we were able to bring the landing page to load between 3-4 secs.

Fig. PageSpeed Insight Score pre-optimisation 

This was the optimized Page Speed insights score for the page.

Fig. PageSpeed Insight Score post-optimisation