While the ad copy of your landing page is important, landing page design also plays a large part in maximizing its performance.

It's easy to get carried away tweaking all the elements of your landing page's design. However, you want to focus on the changes that will make the biggest impact.

To help you increase your conversions, Bradley shaw from dallaswebsitedesign picked up some solid landing page design tips and best practices for optimizing your offer.

Making Your Landing Page Flow?

1. Remove Unnecessary Distractions

Landing pages should look and feel intuitive. The visitor should quickly get an idea of what they're being offered and what actions they can take upon going to your page. There are many distractions that can get in the way of this process including images, security seals, and even the navigation menu.

In this example,VWO increased signups by 100% by simply removing the navigation menu. It goes to show that keeping your design minimal and focused can pay off.

2. Use Typography that Is Readable

When you study the best landing page examples, you'll notice that most of the pages use typography that's easy to read. There's often nothing fancy going on. The focus is on making sure that visitors can quickly scan the message and get the main point.

There are also other elements that make the text, particularly the headline work better. A strong color contrast is used to make the core message stand out. Headlines use bigger and thicker font. There's also a visual hierarchy to the text that leads readers from one point to the next.

3. Use Relevant Imagery

A common mistake that many landing pages make is using the wrong images to support their offer. Too many websites still rely on stock images to make their website look more professional.

The problem with this is that certain stock images have characteristics that indicate that it's a stock image. You want to use strong imagery that supports your message. For example, CodeCombat uses a great image of kids having fun on their computers while learning to programme.

4. Optimize for Mobile Visitors

Landing page design gets tricky when dealing with mobile visitors. There are many things that you'll have to adjust including the page layout, content formatting, loading speed, font size and web buttons.

If you're using a responsive theme, do not assume that your theme will automatically optimize your page for mobile. Do your due diligence and test how your landing page appears on different devices, browsers, and screen sizes.

5. Use Visual Cues

Visual cues can help visitors pay attention to your message and increase your conversions. You can use them explicitly and implicitly. Arrows, circles and dotted lines would be examples of explicit visual cues.

A person looking at a specific direction, spacing, color contrasts and the shape of design elements are examples of implicit visual cues.

This study by ConversionXL found that using a direct arrow increased the attention span spent on a landing page form. Ideally, you'll want to use a mix of both for the best results.

Optimizing Forms and Buttons

6. Experiment with Different Forms

There's nothing wrong with using standard forms if you're just collecting the visitor's name and email. But if your forms call for more than that, you may be able to see better results by using form design that's interactive.

Tools like Leadformly allow you to use multi-step or quiz style forms that can increase signups. It also uses a clever progress bar to indicate to users how far they are along into the form.

7. Optimize Your Call to Action Buttons

Ultimately, you want your visitors to take action. That means that you have to get them to press the button to either subscribe or go to the order page. That's why the design of your call to action button is important.

Start by experimenting with the size and color of the button. Next, you want to play around with the actual call to action text.

You'll be surprised at how much of an impact that this simple test can make to your conversions. If you're using a longer landing page, you will also want to try adding multiple CTA buttons throughout the page to see how that performs.

Trust and Credibility Elements

8. If You're Going to Use Testimonials, Make Them Real

Using testimonials on your page is one of the best ways to strengthen your offer. But it can backfire on you if your testimonials are poor. Common mistakes include using low-quality photos (or none at all), using initials instead of full names, and using general feedback.

If you're going to use testimonials, make sure that they're real. Include the headshot, full name, title, and company of the person that gave you the testimonial. Using video may be even better as adding video to full-page ads increases engagement by as much as 22 percent.

9. Adding Trust Elements Can Lift Conversions

There are many other things that you can do besides adding testimonials to get visitors to trust your landing page. If your company has been featured in trusted media channels or publications, you may want to use their logos on your page and link to the source.

Other elements that can help you include the about us page, privacy policy, and a money back guarantee if you're making a transactional offer. Some other supporting pages that can help include the how it works and comparison sections.

As you can see, there are a large number of design elements that can impact the performance of your landing pages. There's no hard and fast rule for what approaches work. It's best to focus on the fundamentals of why certain design approaches work and experiment with different designs.

Hopefully, these tips and best practices will inspire you to go beyond the ad copy of your landing page and get you in the process of optimizing your page's design as well.