How to make an attention-grabbing landing page

A landing page is how people discover your product and your brand.

You only have 5 seconds to make an impression on your user.

The difference between a bad and a great landing page can make or break your business, so design it wisely.

This is part of a series about creating a highly-optimized landing page:

Part 1: How to make an attention-grabbing landing page

Part 2: How to make your landing page credible

Part 3: How to turn landing page visitors into customers

Estimated reading time: 2 min 10 sec

Background

Hey I’m Miguel!

I'm a new grad software engineer living in NYC and a part-time indie hacker. I’m currently building Journey Plus, an interface for Midjourney.

I used to be a pre-med student, but then I switched to computer science in the spring of 2021, my sophomore year. That's how I got started writing code.

I started with C++, and now I'm mainly building web apps with Next.js, TypeScript, and Supabase.

Write great copy

If there’s only one thing you can take away from this article, it’s this.

Mediocre landing pages with great copy will always convert better than beautiful landing pages with bad copy.

Why?

It’s because the copy is what people look at the most when people visit the website. It gives them context on what your brand and product is about.

It also helps them decide if the product is relevant to them.

So write clear and concise copy that people can understand at first glance.

You can see this effect when you start a/b testing your headline and sub-headline. These are the main elements that you should be focusing a lot on, it’s the first thing that people see when they visit your landing page.

Ideally, your headline is an action statement that reflects the goals of what your user is trying to accomplish.

This is the headline for Journey Plus. It engages users by showing how they can achieve their goal of using Midjourney through a better interface.

Your sub-headline explains what the product is and what it does at a high level.

If you want some examples of how to write great headlines, you can check out this resource.

Great copy also invokes strong emotions.

You want people to strongly desire to use your product since it solves their painful problems.

This invoked emotion will make it a lot easier for users to convert.

Show, don’t tell

Visuals explain concepts 10x better than text in my opinion.

Use visuals to illustrate your product's message and feel, and show users what they can expect from it.

We added this visual here since it helps illustrate some of the features and what feel you can get from it.

Minimize distractions

Remove anything that doesn’t build the case for using your product.

You want to keep your users engaged the entire time, the longer they are on the page, the more trust is built between the user and the product.

The more trust there is, the easier it is for them to convert.

This also has some SEO benefits to help rank your landing page better, mainly related to bounce rate and dwell time.