As a landing page designer, your goal should be to earn your visitors’ attention immediately, speak directly to their pain points, position your product as the solution, and make conversion as frictionless as possible. That means ditching generic copy like “Transform your Business” and weak calls-to-action like “Learn more” in favor of a more evidence-backed approach that drives conversions.
In this guide, you’ll find 9 best practices for landing page design that separate high-converting landing pages from the ineffective ones cluttering the internet. You'll learn why conventional wisdom often backfires, discover the psychological principles that actually drive conversions, and see exactly how to build pages that pass the 5-second test while generating serious revenue for your business.
What is a landing page and why do you need one?
Landing pages solve a fundamental problem in marketing: the disconnect between what brings visitors to your site and what they find when they arrive. A visitor clicking on an ad for “small business accounting software” shouldn't land on a generic homepage talking about enterprise solutions. Instead, they need a page that seamlessly continues the conversation started in that ad.
Landing pages allow you to measure exact ROI from different marketing campaigns, test messaging with specific audience segments, and create personalized experiences that increase conversions.
Key characteristics that separate landing pages from regular web pages:
Complete focus on a single conversion goal rather than multiple objectives
Personalized messaging written for specific traffic sources and audience segments
Limited choices, navigation options, and internal links to avoid derailing the conversion process
Unlike your core product and services pages, landing pages are often designed to accompany specific campaigns and can be retired once those campaigns are finished.
9 best practices for landing page design
Why aren’t your users converting? The answer might be psychological, motivational, or visual. Or, maybe your forms are just too complicated. To cover all your bases, follow these landing page best practices.
1. Pass the 5-second test in your hero section
It’s no secret that your headline is more important than anything else on your landing page. It’s been that way since the days of magazine and newspaper ads. David Ogilvy, who’s often called the father of advertising, has said:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money. The headlines which work best are those which promise the reader a benefit.”
A good rule of thumb is to make sure readers can understand your value proposition within five seconds.
Make sure the following elements are immediately visible:
Compelling headline
Benefit-driven copy
Authentic social proof
A low-friction way to take action
You’ll see these themes reappear throughout the rest of this list, but each of these elements needs to show up above the fold if you want to capture attention immediately.
2. Use messaging that matches your ads
Most people aren’t selling one product with one use case to one audience. That sets you up for a challenge as a designer: it’s entirely possible to create a perfectly-optimized landing page that converts horribly because the wrong audience is seeing it.
Figure out the various audiences you’re targeting with each campaign and make sure you have separate landing pages that address their unique pain points and motivations. You should also take each campaign’s messaging into account. If you have an ad promising to “Cut your onboarding time in half within 30 days,” make sure anyone who clicks that ad sees a landing page echoing the same messaging.
3. Lead with stories to create an emotional connection
If you’re selling accounting software, you could tell users how you offer expense tracking, professional invoices, and AI-powered reconciliation. But your landing page will be much more effective if you identify your audience’s biggest pain point and create a narrative around it.
“It's 9 PM, your family's asleep, and you're still hunched over spreadsheets, manually typing in transaction after transaction, knowing that one misplaced decimal could throw off your entire month. Sound familiar? There’s a better way.”
Lean on copywriting frameworks like PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solution) or BAB (Before and After Bridge) to create an emotional connection with readers—and heighten the stakes—before you make your pitch.
4. Remove navigation elements and links whenever possible
Your job when creating a landing page is to activate pain points, position your product as the solution, and guide users toward conversion. Navigation menus, internal links, and—even worse—external links all take users out of your carefully-constructed funnel by offering distractions.
Remove elements like:
Navbars
Sidebars
Footer links
Internal links
External links
Social media icons
If your landing page is designed for organic traffic, you can probably get away with keeping your main navbar. But if you’re paying for traffic, experiment with removing anything and everything that could distract users from converting, including your primary navigation menu.
5. Reduce friction throughout your signup process
Some people want to convert, but ultimately give up because the path to conversion has too much friction. Fixing this problem is one of your quickest potential wins as you look for ways to boost conversions.
Try tactics like:
Breaking long forms into multi-step flows for complex signups
Letting customers sign up using their Google or Apple login details
Using smart defaults in your forms to auto-fill and auto-format information
Skipping email verification until necessary (since users have to leave to check their inbox)
Put your highest-friction steps at the end of the process. According to the “endowed progress effect,” a psychological principle, users become increasingly committed as they continue through the process—and they’re reluctant to let their effort go to waste after they’ve already invested significant time.
6. Show, don’t tell
Are you a world-class UX agency? Does your app create the most realistic AI animations on the planet? Can your invoicing software help freelancers get paid in record time?
In each of these cases, you can make the claim yourself—but it would be more effective to demonstrate it to users by showing them.
UX agencies can highlight their design portfolio, case studies, high-profile client logos, testimonials, and industry recognition
AI animation tools can embed their most cinematic clips and include an interactive product demo that lets visitors create simple animations
Invoicing apps can give real examples of payment times (”From New York to Stockholm in three seconds”)
Copy is still important, but there’s usually a point where you’ve said enough and it’s time to let visuals do the talking. Depending on your audience, this might be as simple as a screenshot or as complex as an interactive tool that lets users demo your product.
7. Use real product screenshots, not stock photos
Stock photos give your landing page a sense of generic “sameness.” But the bigger issue is that they offer no contribution to the story you’re telling or to your users’ conversion journey. That means they occupy space that would be much better used to talk about pain points or explain why your product is the perfect solution.
Instead, show your product in action, use real customer photos in testimonials, and make sure all visuals directly support your value proposition. If you offer services, use real images of your team in action.
8. Use microcopy to tackle objections and reduce hesitation
Here’s a common scenario in the world of conversion optimization: your visitors have gone through your landing pages, nodded along with all your copy, and are close to clicking on your “Start your free trial now” button.
But then they’re faced with a final wave of presale resistance.
Wait—is the trial really long enough for me to properly test all features?
Will they ask for my credit card and then auto-bill me?
Do I really have enough time to set this up right now?
Can I get my money back if this doesn’t help me?
At this point, customers are usually already convinced your product can solve their problem. They just need reassurances that reduce the perceived risk of taking action. By adding friction-reducing microcopy near CTAs that addresses their concerns—like ”No credit card required,” “Money-back guarantee,” or Get started in 60 seconds”—you can reduce hesitation at the moment of decision.
9. Use specific, credible social proof
Customer testimonials and reviews are the most obvious form of social proof and trust-building, but they’re just the start.
Add a variety of social proof throughout your landing page:
Awards
Case studies
Testimonials
Trust badges
Customer logos
G2/Google ratings
Video testimonials
Choose the formats that are most likely to resonate with your audience. Corporate clients might appreciate compliance certifications and industry awards, while small business clients might benefit more from video testimonials featuring other businesses like theirs.
3 real-world examples of landing page strategy in action
Theory is helpful, but nothing beats seeing landing pages in action. Here are three companies that have done a stellar job of applying best practices to their landing pages—and exactly why their approaches work so well.
Flighty
Flighty is a flight tracking app with a clever twist: it knows about delays before airlines tell you about them, and sometimes even before the pilot finds out.
Why this is an effective landing page:
Flighty passes the 5-second test with flying colors. You immediately know what it is (a flight tracker app) and why you should care (it helps you fly stress-free).
There’s also a sophisticated visual representation of the product using first-person view, so it’s easy to imagine navigating your next trip using their app. Plus, Flighty shows two high-profile awards for social proof above the fold, along with a straightforward “Download for free” CTA.
Flighty also has fantastic copy that tells a story that’s more emotionally-charged than you might expect for a flight tracking app. (“When you were a kid, heading to the airport was magical. An adventure. Now, it feels like guesswork. Trip-changing delays. Last-minute gate changes. Tight-lipped gate agents. Does it really need to feel so stressful?”)
Sync
Sync uses AI to lipsync videos, turning what used to take weeks into something that happens in minutes.
Why this is an effective landing page:
A few years ago, using AI for instant lipsyncing wasn’t a thing. Sync cleverly spends much of its landing page explaining what’s possible and demonstrating the results you can expect—and it does so in an entertaining way. For example, there’s a fascinating interview with Nicolas Cage that’s dubbed and lipsynced into German, French, and Spanish using Sync’s technology.
You can also see an interactive demo of the platform itself, along with a video, and there’s a low-friction CTA (Try Sync for free) that makes it easy to get started.
Acctual
Acctual says it offers “the most flexible invoice on the planet,” letting you get paid in different currencies—including crypto—while your clients pay however they want.
Why this is an effective landing page:
Sending invoices isn’t the most exciting topic around, but Acctual makes a couple of smart moves on its landing page that help it connect on a deeper level with its target audience.
First, it takes a strong stand for something that emotionally resonates with its target audience: getting paid faster. (There are cheeky bits of copy throughout the site that say “Love you, pay me.”)
Second, Acctual’s landing page shows specific examples of how its multi-currency invoicing system works in practice (“Designer sent an invoice and received $4500 in USDC; Fintech CFO received the invoice and paid $4500 in USD”).
Still, wiring thousands of dollars around the world requires serious trust-building. Acctual emphasizes that its tool is used by 5,000+ businesses around the world in 129 countries and showcases prominent brands using its app.
A/B testing and optimizing your landing page performance
Testing is critical because every landing page is a hypothesis. Even if you’re an experienced designer and copywriter—and even if your landing page layouts have worked dozens of times before—any changes to your audience, product, and traffic source can affect conversion rates.
The most valuable tests often contradict conventional wisdom. For example, a video with customers raving about your product or service ought to be a conversion booster. But CXL, a conversion training organization, discusses one case study that saw a simple image outperform a slickly-produced video testimonial.
Some factors to A/B test:
Value proposition
Headline
Offer
CTA buttons
Friction
Price
Most A/B tests fail because they focus on surface-level changes—like button colors—rather than understanding why visitors actually convert. While you can still A/B test colors if you want, spend more time on the psychological triggers that drive purchasing decisions.
Key landing page metrics to track for ongoing improvement
To understand what to test, you need data on how your page is performing. By tracking these metrics, you can understand whether your landing page needs subtle tweaks or a complete overhaul.
Here are the top landing page metrics to track:
Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who complete your desired action (sign-up, purchase, form submission). This is your most important metric. It directly measures how well your page achieves its primary goal and provides a global benchmark for A/B testing improvements.
Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your page without taking any additional actions. A high bounce rate indicates problems with your page layout, content, or user experience.
Average session duration: How long visitors spend on your landing page during their visit. Longer sessions typically indicate higher engagement and interest.
Form abandonment rate: The percentage of users who start filling out your form but don't complete it. High abandonment rates suggest your form may be too long, confusing, or lack clear instructions.
Scroll depth: How far down your page visitors scroll, typically measured as a percentage. Good scroll depth indicates visitors are engaging with your content rather than just glancing and leaving.
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of clicks on specific links or CTAs compared to the number of times they were shown. This helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your calls-to-action and page elements.
Traffic sources: Where your visitors are coming from (paid ads, social media, email, organic search). Understanding this helps you optimize your marketing spend by focusing on the most cost-effective channels.
Heat mapping data: Visual representation of where users click, scroll, and focus their attention on your page. This behavioral data helps optimize page layout and content placement for better user flow.
Use Framer to build landing pages that actually convert
Understanding the psychology and best practices behind effective landing page design is just the beginning. Many teams know they’d be better off with landing pages that are personalized for each campaign and audience—but they lack the development resources to actually make it happen.
Framer solves this by allowing anyone on your team to design and launch landing pages, even if they don’t know how to code. Marketing teams can use Framer's drag-and-drop landing page builder to quickly spin up landing page variants for a campaign without waiting on developers, making it easier and faster to launch, test, and iterate.
Ready to build landing pages that actually convert? Start with Framer's conversion-optimized templates, customize them for your audience, and create your free Framer account to launch high-performing pages without waiting for developers.
