5 Simple Reasons Why Your WordPress Landing Pages Aren’t Converting

Whether your landing page’s goal is to sell products, generate clicks, or build mailing lists, they all require traffic to succeed. However, if your landing page conversions are lacking, the traffic you gain will not equal success.

Ultimately, maximizing conversions is a landing page’s end goal, regardless of your niche or market, and their straightforward design is meant to act as a funnel that leads visitors towards your current offer or promotion. When done right, this process will reward you with a bounty of subscribers and customers.ucc

Design is key when it comes to landing pages, and especially if your site is meant to serve any commercial purpose – for example, in ecommerce, design is crucial.

With that said, improving your landing page conversions is an art form – and correcting any fundamental mistakes is the key to mastering it. With that in mind, let’s go over five common reasons to explain why your landing page conversions are low.

📚 Table of contents:

1. You’re not grabbing the reader’s interest
2. Your call to action buttons aren’t optimized
3. You’re not communicating the benefits clearly
4. You’ve written too much
5. You’re not using enough media

1. You’re not grabbing the reader’s interest

A successful landing page is direct and concise. Visitors should know what they’re in for as soon as they arrive, which means being upfront about any products or services you’re trying to sell.

The goal here is to make sure that readers understand what you’re offering, then reel them in with the benefits – if you succeed in getting your point across, it could net you a potential sale.

This can be as simple as crafting compelling headlines, then following it up with a strong introduction. Headlines grab the attention of your visitors by hinting at what’s to come, and your opening paragraphs convince them to continue reading.

If you read any of the headlines and introductions to my articles on the Themeisle blog, I firstly define a problem, then hint at the solution, and finally outline what’s to follow for the rest of the article. Progressing the narrative in such a way is a powerful method of keeping people engaged.

2. Your call to action buttons aren’t optimized

A good call to action (CTA) is crucial for improving landing page conversions. Whereas the majority of your page will provide visitors with relevant and compelling information, it’s a strategically placed CTA button or two that prompts the visitor to pull the trigger and commit.

CTAs come in many shapes and sizes – including the ubiquitous Buy Now and Download prompts – but the best examples have a few aspects in common:

1. They stand out from the rest of your landing page, making them easy to spot.
2. Buttons make good use of colors to incite specific reactions from visitors.
3. They employ precise wording with active verbs. The name itself is an allusion to this fact – a good CTA is meant to make visitors want to take action.
4. Buttons are placed strategically throughout your landing page. One conventional placement structure involves placing CTAs above and below the fold, as well as in-between particularly informative parts of your site. By doing this, it shows visitors that clicking on them is the next logical step in their journey.

3. You’re not communicating the benefits clearly

Besides a captivating call to action, the strongest elements when creating a compelling landing page are the features of the product or service you intend to market. Nobody wants to feel like they’re the test subject in a marketing scheme, so for you to succeed, you have to be able to outline what’s in it for each visitor.

Think about exactly what the customer will be getting out of this deal, should they decide to sign up or hand over their cash. Once you understand this, and are confident in the service you’re offering, there should be no problem in guiding visitors through the process – which hopefully ends with them opening their wallet.

Let’s review a few simple techniques that can be used to great effect to get your points across clearly:

1. Use fonts choices to your advantage. Employing the right font can increase readability, convey trustworthiness, and improve overall conversions.
2. Employ subheadings to separate paragraphs when you want to move on to new topics. Proper usage of subheadings could also improve your SEO, so it’s a win-win.
3. Formatting is essential. To retain people’s attention, you need to format content in a digestible fashion, so make use of bulleted lists when possible (much like we’re doing right now!).

For example, this landing page by the IMPACT Branding & Design Agency, makes good use of formatting and font styles to convey the benefits of their service to visitors:

4. You’ve written too much

A landing page is essentially a path towards an end goal – whether it’s a purchase, sign-up, or otherwise. Go on for too long and you risk losing the interest of your hard-won readers.

If you focus on concise writing, showcasing the benefits of your product or service, and letting your calls to action do the work for you, it goes a long way to helping increase your landing page conversions.

To recap, keep things short and sweet, and once you’ve made your point, move on to the next one.

If you’re struggling with structuring your landing page and laying out the content, try checking out our guide for creating a landing page from top to bottom using a free drag-and-drop builder.

5. You’re not using enough media

So far we’ve been focusing on using text as the main method of communication, but there are other alternatives at our fingertips.

Using video has been shown to dramatically increase landing page conversions, arguably because it enables visitors to engage with your product without reading walls of text. It also provides you with an opportunity to increase the trust factor by featuring either yourself or satisfied customers, giving your site a personal touch that many landing pages lack.

Furthermore, choosing appropriate and relevant images can also help, as long as you use them to display your products or direct visitors towards key pieces of information throughout your site, instead of employing them merely as decorative elements.

The Basecamp landing page is an excellent example of how media can be used to convey information in a simple manner, while retaining the value of any text on the site:

Conclusion – how to improve your landing page conversions 🧐

In this post, we’ve offered five simple reasons to explain why your landing pages aren’t converting as you’d like. Let’s recap:

Do you have any other useful tips for improving landing page conversions you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments section below!