Landing pages are marketing specific web pages where you direct a visitor to a clear call to action (CTA). Usually to enter their email address and subscribe to get something. and are normally part of a funnel process with landing pages being at the “top of the funnel.”
Landing page builders exist because professionals who run an online business want and need high converting landing pages that are professionally designed and include advanced features like analytics, being able to A/B test different designs and the ability to offer one time offer pages after the user subscribes.
Landing page builders also offer their own dedicated hosting, the ability to setup multiple pages on one domain or to be used on a subdomain of your current primary domain. The hosting aspect is important because if you’re running paid ads, you typically want to drive traffic to a landing page and not your websites homepage.
What to look for in a landing page builder
As someone who runs paid ads on YouTube and Facebook as well as creating offers on all the websites I’ve built and run, here are the specific features I find essential (and thus worth the extra cost) in a website builder:
High quality, modern templates
Having a lot of templates is not always a good thing, what is more important is having modern, high converting templates that you can use and customize to your liking with ease.
Easy to customize
The best landing page builders have some sort of easy to use, drag and drop editor. It’s also helpful if you have the ability to add in your own custom CSS as well as access to the HTML.
Various CTA designs
A call to action or CTA for short is the specific thing you want the end user to do. Be it to get someone to call you, book a free consultation, subscribe to your email list and get a lead magnet or even buy your product right there and then.
Not every business has the same CTA needs so you will need a landing page builder that has a bunch of templates, marketing features and designs with various CTA in mind.
Tripwire page – also known as a one time offer page
A one time offer page, or OTO page as it’s known is a page where you direct the visitor after they convert on your landing page. On this page is where you provide a one time offer for a paid product. Usually and exclusive product not available anywhere else, or an existing product or course at a massive discount.
Landing page builders built for smart business owners and marketers come with this feature built in and well integrated because it’s that important. Particularly if you’re running paid ads as you can recover your ad spend with a great tripwire offer.
Analytics and A/B testing
You need data in order to make informed decisions. This data is in the form of analytics and A/B testing. You need to know how much traffic is hitting your landing page and what the conversion rate is. Then you need to compare the conversion rate of different designs to find the most optimal landing page design for your marketing efforts.
Can handle a lot of traffic
With a landing page builder, you can create landing pages for your websites sales process as well as landing pages you’ll drive traffic too. As such, your landing page builder needs to be able to handle an influx of traffic that you drive to it.
The 7 Best Landing Page Builders for Online Marketing
With that out of the way, here are my top landing page builders for marketers. I’ll cover the pros and cons and the best use case for each option.
- LeadPages
- Convert Kit
- Active Campaign
- Thrive Architect
- Carrd
- Optimize Press
- Click Funnels
Leadpages – The best for landing page builder for sales and conversion
Leadpages offers some of the most comprehensive and easy-to-use landing page-building tools. With over 150 templates covering everything from free giveaways, consultations, checkout pages, or getting visitors on your email list, you can easily customize your pages to meet any design or marketing need.
Leadpages’ drag-and-drop builder makes adding various elements, such as forms, images, videos, and more, easy without knowing how to code. But if you know how to code, then even better, as you can add custom CSS and HTML with the HTML widget.
Marketing features that make them the best
With Leadpages, you can create unlimited landing page versions to A/B test different elements and see what performs best with your target audience. You’ll have access to powerful analytics that will help you optimize your pages and campaigns for maximum success, and you can set up “thank you” pages with a tripwire offer.
Additionally, Leadpages integrates with hundreds of the most popular marketing tools so you can easily track the performance of each page and the success of your campaigns. Furthermore, Leadpages’ mobile optimization capabilities allow you to ensure that your pages look good and work properly on any device.
Finally, you get unlimited traffic to your lead pages (accommodating if you’re going to be driving a lot of traffic), the ability to set everything up on custom domains of your choosing or a subdomain, and AI credits to help you create copy.
Leadpages is my top recommendation
Beginners often get confused as to why would anyone pay money to build a webpage when you can just create a website with WordPress. But with adavanced A/B testing, design, analytics, unlimited traffic, Lead Page is simply a useful tool for your email marketing efforts where everything is done correctly and you can focus on driving traffic, conversion, sales and optimizing your copy.
I use Leadpages for all my email opt-in pages and any page where I’m driving paid traffic to because it know it’s going to be reliable, high converting and I can test and improve my copy.
Pros:
- A huge range on landing pages to test and edit.
- Conversion focused.
- Unlimited traffic and tripwire offers built in.
Cons:
- The price. You can build landing pages with WordPress if you’re starting out, but once you begin earning money from your paid ads and email marketing efforts, you’ll love Leadpages.
Convert Kit – Email marketing and landing pages in one
Convert Kit is my top recommendation for anyone looking for email marketing software. You get access to their powerful tagging feature, complicated email funnel marketing features, excellent deliverability, and quality landing page templates you can use for your marketing. Instead of paying an extra fee for Lead Pages, you can use Convert Kit for both your email marketing
ConvertKit’s segmentation and tagging features makes sure your emails land in the right inboxes, your subscribers get the most optimal user experience which helps increase engagement, conversion of sales and fosters a more personal connection between you and your audience.
Landing page templates built in
ConvertKit also extends its feature set beyond email marketing by offering custom landing page creation. This function allows creators to develop attractive, mobile-responsive landing pages without any need for coding skills. With a variety of pre-designed templates to choose from, these landing pages can be customized to match your brand’s aesthetics and are built for specific purposes:
Lead magnet – Give away a free ebook, cheet sheet, masterclass, coupond code, whatever. A lead magnet is helps you grow your list by offering something of value to your audience.
Coming soon – Get people to subscribe to a product or idea you’re developing and when upon launch, you can email people who wanted to be notified.
Profile – This allows users to tell you what content and ideas they want and need.
Course sign up – Want to offer a free (or paid) course to get your audience to sign up? Convert Kit has templates for that.
Thank you pages – Convert Kit offers quality “thank you pages” that you can direct the subscriber to after they opt-in. On these pages you can offer a tripwire product or just set the context for what happens next after they subscribe.
Convert Kit is the right mix for both beginners and pros
The landing pages Convert Kit provides seamlessly integrate with their email marketing tools, enabling you to capture visitor information and grow your subscriber list directly from the page. This combination of features ensures a cohesive experience for your audience, from landing page visits to email engagement, to product sales.
Pros
- Excellent and advanced email marketing features to drive more sales.
- Quality landing page templates built in.
- Can add a tripwire product after the user subscribes to your list.
- Reliable deliverability.
Cons:
- List focused. Convert Kit is great for one audience and one website. If you want multiple lists for different websites you’ll need separate Convert Kit accounts.
Active Campaign -Email automation and CRM
Active Campaign is the most powerful email marketing software I’ve used. It allows you to set up a forever email funnel that constantly repeats (great for seasonable businesses), multiple lists for different websites in one account, and granularly control over what email is sent out and when. You also get access to forms, chatbots, popups, integration of everything, and analytics.
It’s more expensive than Convert Kit and honestly much more overwhelming, which is why it’s my #2 option because Convert Kit does pretty much everything you need if you’re a YouTuber or have an information website, and all you want to do is collect emails and create advanced marketing funnels.
Active Campaign landing pages
Like Convert Kit, you get a bunch of landing page templates you can use that are pre-designed for a wide array of uses—free courses, coming soon pages, and consultations. Unlike Convert Kit, you also get helpful “recipes,” as they are called, that are prebuilt email funnels you can leverage.
Active Campaign’s landing page templates have been expertly designed to appeal visually while effectively guiding your audience toward your desired action. They are also customizable to your unique brand and goals with their visual builder; these templates are aesthetically pleasing and feature intuitive navigation, responsive design, and integrations with the ActiveCampaign platform.
This ensures you can effectively track interactions, automate follow-ups, and drive conversions by knowing what works and making iterations as needed based on performance data.
Automation email recipes
Finally, email recipes provide a powerful tool for businesses to craft compelling email campaigns quickly and efficiently. These pre-designed layouts and content suggestions are guidelines for creating emails that effectively engage your audience and drive conversions.
Landing pages are critical, but once you get people to sign up, you need a marketing funnel built out. With automation recipes from Active Campaign, you can get started quickly.
Pros:
- No limits to the email marketing features. One of the most feature rich, advanced software options I’ve used.
- Landing page templates and an easy to use drag and drop builder.
- Analytics and integration with forms, chatbots as well as popups.
Cons:
- Expensive and confusing for complete beginners.
Thrive Architect – All-in-one WordPress marketing suite
Thrive Architect is a page-building plugin from Thrive Themes. Honestly, I’m not sure why Thrive Themes is not more popular because they provide a suite of low-cost, valuable tools for those who want to build their website and blog into an actual business.
Multiple high-converting themes to design your website with, Thrive Architect to custom build your homepage, landing pages, thank you pages, and one-time-offer pages. They even made Thrive Cart, a one-time fee shopping cart on par with Samcart.
Suppose you’re a WordPress user and want to keep everything within your WordPress website. In that case, I highly recommend Thrive Architect as your page builder and consider getting a license for Thrive Suite as it contains all their products at one low price (except for Thrive Cart).
Thrive Architect is an intuitive, easy-to-use front-end, drag-and-drop page builder designed to deliver a seamless user experience. This resourceful tool is ideal for professionals aiming for high customization in their web designs without delving into complex coding. It offers a comprehensive collection of elements and templates, enabling the creation of stylish and responsive landing pages. With Thrive Architect, you can bring your most ambitious design ideas to life.
Landing pages
Thrive Architect allows you to create stunning, high-converting landing pages effortlessly. The landing pages built with this tool are visually appealing and fully optimized for engagement and conversion. Thanks to its extensive library of pre-built templates, you can quickly launch a landing page for any purpose – a product launch, a webinar registration, or a lead generation campaign.
Each template is fully customizable, enabling you to brand your pages according to your style. More importantly, Thrive Architect’s mobile responsive landing pages ensure your content looks flawless on any device. With intuitive controls for A/B testing and analytics integration, you can easily measure and optimize your landing page’s performance.
Pros:
- A great selection of templates for landing pages, one time offer pages, thank you pages, webinars, product launch pages and more.
- Customize both your website and landing pages with Thrive Architect.
- Full control over the entire user experience.
- Thrive Suite is a simple, yearly subscription that unlocks all plugins and themes.
Cons:
- As it’s WordPress hosted on your own hosting account, you do need to be aware of your web hosts up-time as well as how much traffic you can drive to your pages.
Carrd – One page websites
I made a few tutorials using Carrd when I stumbled upon them in 2019. They’re a one-page website builder, as in literally one page. Not two, not three pages, one page. That’s their angle and unique selling point when compared to the competition.
One-page websites are an excellent choice for various designs: landing pages, forms, simple portfolio showcase websites, and even personal “about me” style websites. I love how simple Carrd is for creating compelling, elegant landing pages.
They come with a range of templates you can use, or you can custom-build your landing page with their easy-to-use builder, and their price point is quite affordable at only $9-49 a year (not per month). On top of that, with their “pro” plan, you can set a custom domain name for all your landing pages, too.
Finally, if you want a free option, Carrd is a solid choice because many of their templates can be used for free. But on their free plan, you can’t set a custom domain, nor can you use their premium templates. Please note they are strictly a one-page website builder. If you want to collect emails, sell a product, or contain information, you must integrate 3rd party software.
Pros:
- Free plan or a super low cost pro plan.
- A great selection of templates to choose from.
- Excellent landing page options and the ability to custom design to your own liking.
Cons:
- You need the “pro plus” plan to setup redirects. So when a user subscribes, you can direct them to a thank you page built on Carrd.
- Tripwire product pages and one time offer pages are not designed so you’ll need to build these pages yourself.
Optimize Press – High converting marketing pages for WordPress
Optimize Press is Click Funnels for WordPress. If you want those classic, internet marketing-style sales pages with big text, yellow highlighter, and large “but now” buttons, you’ll love Optimize Press.
It’s a WordPress plugin and software suite that allows you to create landing pages, sales pages, marketing funnels, checkout, and payment pages and design your online course.
All within WordPress.
Landing pages with Optimize Press
As I’m covering the best landing page options, I find Optimize Press excellent for creating sales and landing pages. With 100+ templates to edit and adjust that are conversion optimized and easy to adjust to your branding. You can easily change fonts, sizes, colors, text, and video.
Optimize Press also easily integrates with your email marketing service because it’s built on WordPress. Also, the pages are fast-loading and well-designed for speed, unlike other page builders.
Speed is essential because if you’re driving traffic to your landing page from YouTube, a blog, or paid ads, you need that landing page to load quickly to provide a good user experience. Otherwise, a slow-loading page won’t instill trust, and the user may bounce.
Tripwire pages and marketing funnels
Finally, Optimize Press has entire marketing funnels with the required pages, allowing you to set up your marketing efforts fast while not fighting the software to get you to do what it wants. With Optimize Press, it comes with application, lead magnet, branded newsletter and waitlist funnels. You can also craft your own funnel and page sequence on your own.
From creating a landing page with a video and a button or an email opt-in form, you can easily use a lead magnet to get people to subscribe and then direct them to a high-quality one-time offer page or thank you page.
Pros:
- Excellent marketing features and pages built specifically for design, conversion and sales.
- It’s an easy to use WordPress plugin.
- Customize the design of any template.
- Get access to Optimize Press University, a premium WordPress training course.
- Can sell digital downloads and courses.
Cons:
- They have three tiers: Builder, Suite and Suite Pro. Suite Pro is really the only option as you get 5 licenses and access to everything. Suite is decent, but you’re limited to only one site license. The builder plan is not worth the price.
- You’ll need to pay for video hosting if you want to create video courses.
Click Funnels -Classic internet marketing that works
I’ll be straight with you: I was not a big fan of Click Funnels, but I now like the direction they are heading with their service, and this list would not be complete if I didn’t recommend them because they are an excellent option for the right person.
Compared to your other options, they are a bit pricy if you’re starting and way overpriced if all you need are landing pages (and other high-quality marketing pages with analytics – Get Lead Pages if that’s you). However, they have excellent, high-converting sales pages; you can create and host your video courses with them.
If you intend to create courses and low-priced products and host them all on Click Funnels, then the price point is worth it. In addition, Click Funnels is becoming a Kajabi competitor because they want to be your go-to source for all your services.
Click Funnel features:
Here is what you get when you get a Click Funnels account:
- Create a website and blog for content marketing.
- Sell courses and other digital products.
- Engage in email marketing; there is no need for a 3rd party anymore.
- Get access to high-quality, high-converting templates.
- Build a membership website.
- Analytics and A/B testing.
If you intend to use all their features, then the price point is entirely worth building your business on, as you can create high-quality landing pages and sales pages to convert traffic into subscribers and buyers.
Click Funnels landing pages
ClickFunnels is designed with user-friendliness, allowing you to effortlessly create landing pages without any coding knowledge. Drag and drop elements, then quickly edit them with a simple click. If you are proficient in coding, you can dive into the code editor to customize further or add personalized features.
Easily create compelling call to actions. Whether you’re directing organic or paid traffic, you can guide your audience to a designated destination that motivates them to take a specific action, all without the usual distractions of a conventional website.
This allows you to generate leads quickly. By converting more visitors into leads, you can accelerate the process of turning them into paying customers through opt-in pages, enticing lead magnets, event registrations, and more.
Finally, with Click Funnels you can supercharge your sales by being able to offer subscription options, one-time offers, upsells, order bumps, and an array of high-converting, simplified variations of landing pages professionals need.
Pros:
- Excellent landing page templates that are easy to customize without coding.
- Setup one time offers, thank you pages and upsells easily with Click Funnels.
- A full suite of marketing tools: Build a website, blog, online store and leverage internet marketing principles to their fullest.
- Email marketing now included.
Cons:
- If you’re not going to use all of Click Funnel’s features, then they are quite expensive if all you’re looking for is to create quality landing pages for your marketing efforts.
Best landing page builders conclusion
That’s it for my guide on the best landing page builders for marketers, selling and conversion. I’ve used all these platforms and it really comes down to what you need and are tying to do. In general, I strongly suggest Lead Pages if all you need are quality landing, sales and one time offer pages.
What I do is design my marketing pages with Lead Pages and then host my content over at my Teachable course website. Others suggest Same Cart. Regardless, you now have a wide range landing page builders to help you grow your email list, sell more products and be helpful to your audience.
