9 Things to Decide Before You Design a Landing Page
Most bad landing pages are design problems caused by a decision nobody made. Settle these nine questions on paper and the layout largely designs itself.
You have a campaign ready to go. The budget is approved, the ad is written, the flyer is at the printer. Then someone asks the question that always gets answered in about four seconds: what URL do we point it at?
Nine times out of ten the answer is the homepage, because the homepage is the address everyone knows. It is also, nine times out of ten, the wrong answer, and the reason a campaign that looked fine on paper produces almost nothing.
What each page is actually for
A homepage answers one question: who are you? It has to serve everybody who arrives: the returning customer looking for your phone number, the supplier checking you are real, the job applicant, the person who half-remembers your name from a van they saw last week. To do that it stays broad. It offers choices. It links everywhere.
A landing page answers a completely different question: should I do this now? It exists for one audience arriving from one place, expecting one thing, and it is built to get them to a single action (enquire, book, call, or download).
Both are legitimate pages. They are simply not interchangeable, and treating them as interchangeable is the mistake.
The five ways a homepage sabotages a campaign
It breaks the promise the ad made. Your ad said fixed-price boiler service, £89. Your homepage says Welcome to Hendricks Heating. The visitor has to work out for themselves whether they are in the right place, and a fair number decide they are not.
It offers too many exits. A homepage has a navigation bar, a footer, service links, a blog teaser, a phone number. Every one of those is an invitation to go somewhere other than the thing you paid for. You bought a click and then handed the visitor twenty ways to spend it.
It buries the offer. The campaign offer is one item among eight on a homepage, usually below the fold and usually phrased more cautiously than the ad was.
It cannot be measured cleanly. Homepage traffic is a blend of everything: returning customers, search, direct, and your campaign. Pulling the campaign’s real performance out of that mixture is guesswork.
It cannot be changed freely. Rewriting the homepage for a two-week promotion means changing the page every other visitor sees. So nobody does it, and the campaign runs against a page that ignores it.
When a homepage genuinely is the right destination
There is a real exception, and it is worth naming rather than pretending landing pages always win.
If the campaign is brand awareness rather than a specific offer (a sponsorship, a local radio ad, a logo on a shirt), the homepage is correct. Those visitors have no single intent. They are curious about who you are, which is precisely the question a homepage is built to answer.
The same applies to a business with one service and one audience. If you are a single-location dentist offering general dentistry, your homepage may already be the most focused page you could build. Making a second one would just duplicate it.
The rule is not "always build a landing page". It is: match the page to how specific the visitor’s intent is.
What a landing page removes, and why
The instinct with landing pages is to think about what you add. In practice most of the value comes from what you take away.
The navigation goes. Not hidden, not shrunk. Removed. There is nowhere to go but forward or back.
The other offers go. One page, one thing. If you sell six services and the ad was about one, the other five do not appear.
The choices go. No "learn more", "see our work" and "get a quote" competing for the same click. One action, repeated at the points where a reader is likely to be ready for it.
The hedging goes. A homepage has to be reasonable to everybody, so its language drifts towards the general. A landing page can be blunt, because it is only speaking to one person.
What remains is short, and that is the point. The page has one job and everything on it either moves the reader towards that job or gets cut.
The same offer on both, side by side
Take a dental clinic running a paid ad for whitening at a fixed price.
Sent to the homepage, the visitor lands on a rotating banner about the practice, a row of six service tiles, a team section and an opening-hours block. Whitening is tile four. They scan, do not immediately see the price they were promised, and either click into a generic service page that does not mention the offer, or leave. The ones who do persist have taken three clicks to reach a form that asks for eight fields, most of them irrelevant to a whitening enquiry.
Sent to a landing page, the same visitor sees the same words the ad used, the price, three sentences on what the appointment involves, two before-and-after photos, the practice’s address and a three-field booking form (name, phone, preferred day). No navigation. No other services. The action they came to take is visible without scrolling, and available again at the bottom.
Nothing about the offer changed. Only the distance between arriving and acting.
How to decide for your next campaign
Three questions, and they take about a minute.
One: does the traffic arrive with a specific expectation? If the ad, email or flyer named a service, a price or a deadline, that expectation needs to be met on arrival. Landing page.
Two: are you paying for the clicks? Paid traffic is the clearest case for a landing page, because every wasted visit has a price attached. Organic visitors who found you by searching your name are a different matter.
Three: do you need to know whether it worked? If the answer has to be a number rather than a feeling, the campaign needs its own page. One page, one source of traffic, one action to count.
Two or three yes answers and you want a dedicated page. All three no, and your homepage is fine. Send the traffic there and spend the effort elsewhere.
The good news is that a landing page is a small piece of work compared to a website. It is one page, it does not touch anything you already have, and it can be live long before the campaign starts.
