Landing page or company website: which one makes sense for you
Both are websites, but they solve different problems. Picking the wrong one means paying for pages nobody visits, or having a single page trying to explain the whole company.
Ariadne Studio · 3 min read
In this article 4 sections
Summary
- A landing page is one page with one goal. A company website presents the whole company.
- For a campaign, launch or event, start with a landing page.
- If customers research before they buy, you need the website. You can start with one and grow into the other.
Almost every quote request comes in with one of two words: “landing page” or “website”. Often the person doesn’t know yet which one they need, and that’s fine. The difference is simple once you look at what each one does.
#Landing page: one page, one goal
A landing page exists to lead the visitor to a single action: buy a product, sign up for an event, ask for a quote. Everything on the page pushes toward that action. There’s no menu with ten items, no “about us” page, no blog. People who land there came from an ad, a post or a link, and they already know more or less what they want.
- Good for: campaigns, launches, events, a specific offer.
- Timeline: usually ready much faster than a full website.
- Easy to measure: how many people arrived, how many took the action.
#Company website: the whole business
A company website has several pages and answers the questions people ask while researching before they decide: who the business is, what it does, who it has worked with, where it is, roughly how much it costs. It’s also what shows up when someone searches your name on Google.
- Good for: being found, building trust, showing services and work.
- Grows with you: you can add pages, a catalog and a blog later.
- Works on its own: brings in visits from Google without you paying for each click.
#How to decide
Ask two questions. Where do your visits come from? If they come from ads or from a campaign with a start and an end, a landing page does the job. Does the customer need to know the business before buying? If so, you need a website.
Many businesses use both: the company website as the base, and a landing page for each campaign, linked to it. The landing page talks about one offer. The website holds up the trust behind it.
#Start with one and grow into the other
You don’t have to decide everything at once. A well-built landing page can become a website’s homepage later, and a well-structured website can take new landing pages without being rebuilt. What matters is that the first thing you put live is built with what comes next in mind.
