Designer Spotlight: 10 Best Practices for Effective Landing Page UX Design

Landing Page UX Design: Where art meets conversion

Building a compelling landing page is a crucial part of converting visitors into leads or customers for your business. It’s in the name—it’s where people first “land,” eager to know more about what you can offer. They are curious and excited, but are they willing to take the next step?

Motivating users to click through and buy a product, fill out a form, contact your team, or take any other action means building trust and confidence. Your landing page should clearly illustrate what commitment the user is making, as well as what reward they can expect as a result. As the first point of contact in your audience’s experience with your company, optimizing the UX of your landing page is vital to communicating this information and creating successful conversions.

So, what does effective landing page UX design look like?

There is no clear-cut answer to this question. The success of each landing page depends on its specific industry, product, and target audience; however, there are some universal guidelines that can be followed to craft effective user experiences and drive conversions. Here are some best practices in engaging landing page UX design:

1. Understand and demonstrate your value proposition

Prior to initiating the design phase, it’s essential for your team to unite under a cohesive vision. Can you distill your offerings into a concise headline, a brief description, and a clear call to action? These three factors are the main ingredients of a successful landing page hero section, and visitors need to quickly be able to understand your value proposition within the first minute of viewing your landing page. Take the time with your team to align on the core value of your products or services so that you can present them consistently, concisely and effectively.

2. Define your metrics

Crafting a successful landing page requires a solid foundation of clearly defined conversion goals and measurable metrics. Before delving into design tools, establish specific objectives such as download numbers, sign-ups, or purchases for your landing page. These KPIs will serve as a guiding framework for your design efforts.

Monitoring metrics and UX data analytics like conversion rates (CR), click-through rates (CTR), and bounce rates (BR) provides insights into the effectiveness of the page’s UX design in meeting its objectives. Consistently examining this data unveils what’s effective and what needs improvement, and you can use these findings to iteratively optimize the design of your landing page.

3. Consider your customer journey

When customers are prepared to engage, whether to gain more information, progress to the next stage, or sign up for a newsletter, the landing page should streamline their desired action with minimal friction. Clarity is key!

When customers decide to take action, it should be immediately clear how to proceed and what the outcome of their actions will be. The customer journey is anything but linear, with viewers navigating, dropping off, returning, and seeking external information before continuing on. Employ design elements that minimize friction and seamlessly guide users toward their next action, minimizing the likelihood of visitors turning elsewhere.

4. Employ familiar page layouts

Minimalism is one of the dominant UI/UX design trends of the past decade and one that translates perfectly into the realm of landing page design: overloading the attention of landing page visitors with confusing layouts or unconventional element placements will likely lead to abandonment. Designers should instead prioritize usability, familiarity, and transparent functionality when designing a landing page to ensure successful conversions.

The average Internet user dislikes surprises and navigating uncharted territory. Designers should harness established landing design patterns, such as logo placement, navigation style, visual hierarchy, and CTAs, aligning with users’ pre-existing mental models of interacting with landing pages. Consistency not only reduces cognitive load, but also imparts a sense of control, explaining why many popular landing pages share a similar look and functionality.

5. Establish a clear visual hierarchy

Creating a high-quality landing page design hinges on establishing a strong visual hierarchy. This crucial element not only ensures intuitive usability but also captivates visitors visually, guiding their gaze throughout their overall journey. To create a compelling visual hierarchy for your landing page, you should keep in mind the following key design elements:

1. Size: Use larger elements to draw the visitors’ attention to the most important sections of the landing page; for example, you might incorporate a full-width image to draw attention to the hero section.
2. Contrast: Employ color, font styles and sizing, and varying textures to clarify the relationship between design elements and make the page easier to scan.
3. Alignment: Ensure your alignment is consistent, whether your design elements are aligned to a grid, directionally aligned (left, center, or right aligned), or both.
4. White space: Cut nonessential information and focus on bringing attention to important elements through the use of white space. Leave empty space around blocks of text to boost legibility.

6. Stay aware of load times

A sluggish landing page isn’t just inconvenient; it’s a missed opportunity. According to Google, if your landing page takes longer than 1 to 3 seconds to load, expect a bounce rate of at least 32%. That means a significant chunk – 1 out of 3 visitors – will bid farewell before your page even appears. Mobile visits suffer even more, with about 53% abandonment when pages take 3 or more seconds to load.

To keep visitors hooked, your landing page needs to beat the clock. Evaluate your page load speed using free tools like Google’s Page-Speed Insights or Pingdom. Ensure your pages pass the Web Vitals and Core Web Vitals tests (for both desktop and mobile) before hitting the publish button.

7. Don’t forget about mobile design

If your landing page UX doesn’t clear Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, avoid channeling your mobile campaigns or ads towards them. Landing pages lacking mobile-friendliness, quick loading, or essential features like pinch-to-zoom, non-intrusive pop-ups, and legible text blocks are bound to face a 100% bounce rate on mobile websites. It’s crucial to factor in the customer journey and anticipate the user’s likely device. Through testing, ensure that the experience is both appealing and functional across various devices.

8. Keep links focused on key actions

Steer your landing page UX with a strategic focus on guiding visitors toward conversion – the ultimate success for any landing page. Oli Gardner, the brain behind Unbounce, introduces a helpful concept known as “attention ratio” to capture user attention effectively. Gardner emphasizes maintaining a 1:1 ratio between clickable links and conversion goals on a landing page. Simply put, if your landing page aims for one specific conversion (like downloading a PDF), limit it to just one primary clickable link.

Including several links can divert user attention from the intended action, so designers should refrain from incorporating distracting links and ensure that the primary CTA is clear and unambiguous. It’s okay to have one or two smaller social media links, as long as they don’t overshadow the main CTA buttons. By reducing choices, you minimize confusion and streamline the conversion process.

9. Pay attention to the copy

The cornerstone of your landing pages lies in crafting compelling copy that motivates users to take action. The key to achieving this lies in tailoring the copy to resonate with your persona. Your target audience should connect with the copy as if they could have penned it themselves; when your target market senses that you grasp their challenges, the likelihood of them converting to customers significantly increases.

10. Use A/B testing and iterative improvements

A/B testing in landing page UX design involves comparing two distinct versions of the same landing page so that determine which one performs better. It serves as a method for testing design decisions and variations to identify the version that converts more visitors.

To conduct effective A/B testing in landing page UX design, start by setting clear goals, such as increasing conversions or clicks, to provide direction for your tests. Create two versions of your page, each differing only in the specific design elements being tested. To prevent bias, split traffic by randomly directing two groups of users to each version.

Track key metrics for both versions, including scroll-depth, conversions, and clicks, and identify significant differences in the test results. Analyze your data to determine the winning version of your landing page. Finally, implement the successful design for all users, ensuring optimal performance based on the insights gained from the testing process.

Summing up landing page UX design

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to build compelling landing pages and succeed at converting visitors into customers. By following these 10 best practices for landing page design, you can create intuitive and impactful experiences for your landing pages.

Written by Yota, one of Goji Labs’ rockstar product designers. Want some help or advice with UX design? Reach out to us—we’d love to talk 🙂