7 Essential Steps to Build Landing Pages with WordPress

Now that you have an idea start to build landing pages and introduce it to your audience, test it, improve it and, (why not?) sell it.

The landing page is the fastest way to bring the big idea in front of your audience. I can’t stress enough how important landing pages are for your business growth, so the earlier you start creating them, the better. To help you out, I wrote down the 7 steps I do to create a landing page for a client (even before I create a multi-page website for them). Here they are…

Step 1 – Buy your domain

All great businesses start with the domain. Choosing a suppliers for a great domain name can be overwhelming. There are so many! For security reasons, I always encourage my clients to buy the domain from one supplier, and host it in another supplier. We highly trust Hover for this job.

Step 2 – Host your domain on a reliable server, and install wordpress

Once you buy the domain, it’s time to find a proper host for your future WordPress website. Keep in mind these minimal WordPress server requirements:

PHP 5.6.x or above
MySQL 5.6 or above
The mod_rewrite Apache module
HTTPS support

… and see more information about this in the official WordPress documentation page.

When I started helping my clients with their WordPress websites I hated the job. Everything was working so slow! I was struggling with a lot of bugs, and errors while trying to do my part. Sometimes I couldn’t even create a basic website due to poor hosting. Things have however changed dramatically when I discovered SiteGround. With the fully optimized servers, the best hosting environment, and a great customer service, this is my go to supplier for hosting small and medium size websites. Today I work exclusively with SiteGround because I know it works!

Your business growth depends on choosing the right hosting. Never buy a cheap service without asking a business consultant / web designer / marketer first etc. You might not see the value of a website hosting (and that is ok!), but this can be a business breaker. A cheap hosting could EASILY cost you $$$ on the long run because it has more security issues, poor load speed, constant errors, and it takes more time to build something on it.

Step 3 – Use a Friendly Page Builder to create your landing page from scratch

For a newbie, WordPress is not the friendliest environment to build a website. Not as friendly as Squarespace anyway! 🙂 But it does allow you to scale your business on the go. So I encourage you to take your time and get familiar with it. To make it easier, I encourage you to do these 3 steps to get started right away and start to build landing pages:

Install the FREE Astra theme. It’s simple, friendly and looks good!
Buy and install the Beaver Builder. It makes the dragging and dropping elements around the page easy and intuitive. And up until now, it never broke after a plugin update! Today I am confidently recommending it to ALL my clients.
To extra styling on the page, you might want to consider adding another premium plugin (though the Beaver Builder plugin could be enough!) : Ultimate Beaver Builder Addon.

This will make your life so much easier, and will allow you to scale in the future.

Step 4 – Optimize the page for SEO

A website does not bring results right away. Start with the on-site SEO optimization to bring traffic to the page. There are a couple of options available on the market waiting for you. I successfully used the Yoast SEO plugin to help me do the job.

This plugin allows me to add Page description, title, and a focus keyword. Plus, if I want to control how an URL will be previewed when shared on Facebook, I can choose my custom Title, description and image. That is a great deal!

Step 5 – Connect and automated emailing service

Postponing the email list growth plan for when your full multi-page website will be ready is a TERRIBLE MISTAKE! The earlier you start, the better!

By not having a community to share your gifts with, you end up like an amateur talking to crickets, with no constant sales to support your business. I particularly tested more suppliers, but after some failures I decided to get back to the old but reliable Mailchimp.

Step 7 – Track your goals with Analytics

Where there is no plan, there is no growth. Even before you start creating the landing page, you should have a strategy in place. What do you want to achieve with it? Do you want to grow the email list, want more downloads of your e-book, want sales? You decide the goal.

Like most of businesses, I use Google Analytics to track the results of my work. To add a website to Google Analytics you must use a google email account to login on the platform. And if you want to have the analytics inside your WordPress platform, use a plugin to work with. I personally tested and recommend the Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP) and the Analytify – Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress.

—

This page includes Raluca’s personal experiences and practices to get you inspired. However nor Raluca Comanescu or Unfold Atelier is to be responsible for the way you are applying them for your business. And yes, few of the links in this page are affiliate links. I tested them and they worked for my business, so I’d be 100% recommending them regardless of the small commission I get if you buy.