Landing page versus website

A landing page or a website—that is the question; For many small business owners, it’s vital to learn who wins in a landing page versus website battle.

Really, how do you decide whether you need a simple landing page or a full-fledged website? You do need to create an online presence for your business. Now that’s the catch, sometimes, a landing page would be way more helpful than a website, and vice-versa. How do you make a choice between the website and a landing page?

Website vs Landing page differences

First, let’s look into the main points that differentiate a landing page from a website. Obviously, the term landing page hints that it’s a single page, while a typical website rocks 5 pages or more.

If you go with a landing page, it should describe your products and services, drive conversions or capture leads. Your dedicated landing will:

• promote an individual offer, product, or service
• offers an incentive for customers to follow your CTA.
• usually lack navigation options (which is ok)

Now, a website is a combination of interlinked pages presenting a particular business. In this case, each page describes a separate product/service. Sure, a website is bigger than a landing page, but we know that bigger is not always better. Your typical website should:

• have several pages connected through the site map or internal linking
• contain separate pages that talk about separate topics
• offer access to the products and services your business provides

So these are the basic differences between the two. It’s time to go over the things that can solve the landing page versus website dilemma that small business owners usually face.

• Aim/purpose
• Features
• Information

Purpose of a website and a landing page

This is so vague. What does it mean? This basically means you have to define the goals your landing page/website will help you achieve.  

What is the purpose of a website?

Go for a website if you want to present and go into details describing your brand and its values. Many small e-commerce stores and startups go big and invest in a website. The thing is, without a range of products, services, or expertise your website will simply look empty.  

Your website is bound to grow your business, strive for long-term results, attract organic traffic, and build a community around your brand. It sure helps to increase brand recognition and trust in your company. Having multiple pages means offering to follow multiple actions. This expands the time your potential customers spend on your site. Home page, about page, contact us page, blog section —these things draw the customer deeper into the website and hopefully reduce bounce rate.

One of the things to consider when opting for a website is the fact that you’ll have to work to improve SEO or use the services of an SEO company, which also has its pros and cons.

Purpose of a landing page?

On the contrary, a single landing page is ideal as a landing page for a product, service, or event, like a webinar landing page. There is also a landing page to generate leads. It usually urges your landing page visitor to take action right here, right now. It’s the perfect option if you want to create a landing page for a book or an online course and run paid ad campaigns to promote them. A mobile landing page builds brand awareness as you can promote it on social media like Instagram or Facebook. Most people access these platforms from their mobile devices.

As a side note, many small businesses incorporate QR codes for business marketing and other uses. These QR codes usually contain a link to a business website, a landing page with a special offer, or a customer service chatbot.

Features: landing page vs website

A website is a lot like a tour guide. It leads your potential customer to the main attractions of your business. Your website shows your achievements and things your business takes pride in. It persuades your potential customer to do business with your brand and not your competitor.

Put on display your expertise in the niche with a website, use social proof, start a blog to show that you know what you are talking about, especially if it’s a very niche product or service.

Now when it comes to a landing page, there is your door-to-door salesman that brings your product to a customer. Your customer scrolls through Instagram feed and spots an ad for your landing page, clicks on it, and 🧨💥 bam you have his/her attention, start selling. Since the landing page has super limited navigation, it still covers the essentials: lead generation landing page — asks to leave contact information, webinar landing page — invites to register for an event, and so on. Landing page types stem from the duty they serve. Invite customers to sign up for your newsletter, and enroll students in your online course. There are landing pages for giveaways or seasonal sales, a landing page for social media bio link, and so much more. There is even a thing called mobile app landing page used to help promote your mobile application online. The limit is your imagination and whether it’s actually suitable for your business in particular.

It’s worth noting that both a website and a landing page support useful integrations and features. These can include a chatbot subscription widget, payment system, analytics to better understand users’ interactions with your brand, and smart pop-ups to boost lead generation, of course.

Info these two provide

As I’ve already mentioned above, a website consists of several pages, so it can’t really be about the same thing on every page, it just makes no sense and is bad for SEO. Each new page is dedicated to a different product, service, or information. Big companies usually provide multiple pages: homepage, about us page, products, and services page, get in touch pages, blog section, FAQs, knowledge base, glossary, press about us — basically anything that represents and elaborates on your company’s whereabouts and things you offer as a business.

Landing pages, while a bit similar, yet, provide information about a specific item or offer. These can be portfolio pages that present your skills and expertise. A webinar landing page that has details on speakers, topics, time and place of a webinar, and so on. An online course landing page is designed to present your course, instructors, and syllabus payment methods if it’s not free.

Landing page versus website conclusions

The landing page vs website debate is a never-ending story. There can’t be a definite answer, really, as every business is unique and requires a unique approach to presenting itself online. The points mentioned above will help guide business owners just looking into creating a spot for their brand on the web. The price of a landing page should be an important thing to consider, as developing a fully functional website (even with a website builder) will turn out to be a little more expensive.