Landing page vs. website: which one does your business need first?
They are not a small and a big version of the same thing. A website introduces your business to anyone who looks for it. A landing page convinces one kind of person to take one action. Which one comes first depends on where your customers are coming from.
What each one is for
A website is your home online. Several pages: who you are, what you do, your work, your team, how to reach you. People browse it. They arrive from Google, from a referral, from your card, and they look around until they trust you enough to get in touch.
A landing page is a single page built around one offer and one action. No menu leading elsewhere, no "about us" detour. Everything on it, from the headline to the last question in the FAQ, exists to move one visitor toward one yes: book a call, ask for a quote, buy.
| Website | Landing page | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Introduce the business | Get one action |
| Pages | Several | One |
| Visitor | Anyone who looks you up | One kind of customer, usually from an ad or a campaign |
| Success looks like | Trust, then a message | A lead or a sale, measured |
Start with a landing page if
- You are about to run ads. Sending paid traffic to a homepage is paying for people to wander. A landing page matches the ad they clicked and asks for one thing.
- You sell one main service or product. If most of your revenue comes from one offer, a page that sells that offer does more than five pages that describe everything.
- You are launching something. A new service, a course, an event. It needs its own page with its own argument.
- You need results soon. A landing page is faster to make. Mine take seven days from the briefing to going live.
Start with a website if
- People find you by searching your name. They want to check you are real and established. A single sales page can feel thin to them.
- You offer many different services to different kinds of clients, and each one needs its own explanation.
- Your business runs on reputation more than on campaigns: architects, clinics, law firms, studios. There, a portfolio and a clear story matter more than a single call to action.
What each one costs
Using my own prices as a reference: a landing page costs US$ 2,500, 4,500 or 6,500, depending on how much research and copy goes into it and whether the ads come with it, and a full multi page website from about US$ 8,000 to US$ 12,000. The difference is mostly the number of pages and the amount of writing, not the design.
If you have no visual identity yet, it is worth talking about that first. A page is much stronger when it sits on a brand that already has a face, and doing both together costs less than doing them apart.
The order that usually works
For most small businesses about to invest in ads, the sequence that pays off fastest is:
- Landing page first, for the offer that brings in most of the money, connected to the ads.
- Measure for a few weeks. Which headline works, where people stop reading, which questions they ask.
- Then the website, built with what the landing page taught you about your customers. The words that sold on the page become the words on the site.
The mistake to avoid is building a big website first and then pointing ads at its homepage. It is the most expensive way to find out that nobody reads past the first screen.
Brand and landing page designer in Brazil, working US hours. More than ten years and over a hundred clients. I do the research, the copy, the design and the build, and the person you talk to is the person doing the work.
See my work