What are the differences between a regular website and a landing page?

People often misunderstand the difference between landing pages, regular websites, and business card websites. We will clarify these points and highlight the key differences between a landing page and a website in this material. This will allow the consumer to make the right choice when ordering a landing page or a website.

 Landing page and a regular website: what are they?

         A landing page is a single-page website aimed at attracting a larger number of visitors. It is designed to perform a specific target action — a purchase, an order, a download, registration, a booking, etc. The main difference between a landing page and a standard single-page website is the promotion of just one specific product or one of the services.

         A regular website or a business card website contains many pages broken down into separate categories and several sections. They provide information about the owning company, its products or the list of services provided, their characteristics, advantages, features, and much more that is useful for a business presentation. These types of websites are equipped with a large volume of functionality: a shopping cart, an online assistant, a location map, news blocks, and so on.

Distinctive features of a landing page compared to a website

• Difference: how traffic is attracted

         Any search for the required link is carried out by entering a query into the search bar of any search engine. The user chooses the website from the resulting list of links that most fully matches their query. To take higher positions in search engine results, a landing page is promoted using paid contextual advertising. For this purpose SEO is ineffective in 95% of cases, which leads to a serious loss of traffic.

• Difference: a high conversion rate

         The information contained in a landing page is concise and informs the visitor about a specific product/service, its features and advantages, price, ordering method, and other points important to a potential client. The structure of a landing page form lacks distracting factors for the visitor, and this increases the page conversion rate.

• Difference: a landing page is cheaper to develop and gives a fast effect

         A landing page acts as a full-fledged website with its own specifics — its development takes more than 14 days and costs 1.5-2 times less. The first visitors can appear on this resource quite quickly — 2-3 hours after launching contextual advertising, whereas with promotion via SEO they will arrive in a month or two.  

• Difference: a landing page has no navigation

         A landing page has no navigation menu, since all the presented information is located on a single page. It uses a menu that scrolls to the required logical block. Such a menu reduces the website conversion rate.

• Difference: the call to action for the consumer

         The design of a landing page and its content guide the user towards performing a specific action — selling a product/service. Such a page calls to action with the all-important button.

Which is preferable — a website or a landing page?

         It is impossible to unequivocally name one of these websites the best, since each carries its own semantic load and fulfills a specific goal set during the development of a particular business. If your goal — selling a product or service as fast as possible, then the only option is to develop a landing page. In case you need to convey more complete information about your business — details about the company, its products/services, their characteristics and advantages, a regular multi-page website or a business card website will be more effective.

Summary: the difference between a website and a landing page

         The main task of a landing page is to increase the conversion rate and take effective measures to maximize it. When using other types of websites, the conversion rate becomes a secondary task, putting the increase of future clients' loyalty to the represented company in the main role, along with forming a good image and ensuring resource recognition. Before choosing the type of website to promote your business, decide on its goals and objectives, and choose the required form of your web resource accordingly.