How to make the best landing pages for your Shopify store

Rudi Eihenbaums

Dec 8, 2023

There’s no single best landing page for a Shopify store. So don’t focus all your time on optimizing your homepage.

It takes milliseconds for your customers to form an opinion when they land on any page of your Shopify store, and it won’t always be the homepage. Make every interaction with your website count.

Think of each landing page as a unique space. Each one should be made for a specific marketing initiative or customer segment, whether it’s for email marketing, organic search, paid advertising on social media, referrals, or any other way to promote your store (60+ ideas).

For me, as a growth marketer, effective landing pages must do the following:

• Capture the right traffic

• Communicate a brand’s value quickly

• Avoid overwhelming customers

• Drive more conversions

9 ways to improve your Shopify landing pages

Here’s how to build out a great customer journey on your website and increase conversions.

1. Know your audience

First, understand your customers’ motivations, desires, and frustrations. Make sure your landing page resonates with the customers’ expectations, problems, and goals.

My go-to playbook:

• How to understand & segment your customers

2. Choose one purpose for each page

Every landing page should serve a specific purpose, whether it’s the page you use for a specific Instagram ad or customer segment. Avoid catch-all landing pages or directing paid advertising traffic to your homepage. 

• Product pages (or product detail pages) should emphasize your brand’s value proposition(s), tell the product’s story, and spotlight ways the product can fix a customer’s problem. You can also foster a sense of urgency to persuade visitors to add a product to their cart, but be careful to not cheapen your brand with countdown timers (unless it’s a Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotion). Focus on relieving stress with your product.

• Collection pages should not just be a list of your products in a specific category, but an engaging browsing environment that guides customers through your collection of related products that they may not have considered, showing off your brand’s breadth related to their needs.

• Effective product bundle pages address categorization from another angle. They curate products that go well together, sweetened with discounts or exclusive offers. Here’s how successful clothing stores approach bundling.

• Sales and promotions should have their own landing pages to spotlight deals with a sense of urgency. Visitors who show real interest in these pages but don’t buy can be a great target for remarketing campaigns.

• Seasonal landing pages should promote your products by capturing the season’s spirit. Think of these pages as evergreen when it comes to optimizing for organic search and make sure they can be reused each year (at the same URL, so don’t include the year in the URL).

Depending on your niche, many other landing pages can be effective in e-commerce, such as lead generation pages for booking product consultations or receiving exclusive content, ‘coming soon’ pages for teasing new products, and pages showcasing collaborations with other brands.

3. Don’t lead with features, but solutions

The headline of every landing page should immediately capture attention and communicate value.

Instead of focusing on product features, craft headlines that emphasize benefits and can increase conversion rates. Benefit-oriented headlines resonate more with customers who want to improve their lives or solve their problems.

4. Update your designs & visuals

Make sure your Shopify theme matches your audience’s expectations. Upgrade your site if it’s been a while, and find a theme that can display your brand’s value propositions, narratives, and effective calls to action (CTAs). 

• If you’re feeling out of your depth, hire an expert freelancer or agency to help you.

• If your product photos need a refresh, use these tips from a London-based e-commerce photographer.

Only incorporate visual content that aligns with your offerings and messages. Limit unnecessary stock photos or graphics.

5. Don’t overwhelm customers with choices

Curate each landing page to suit one or two use cases. Don’t overwhelm visitors. Instead, link out to other products or pages at the end or in your main navigation menu.

A decluttered landing page eliminates distractions and can improve conversion rates.

6. Edit your copy to be concise

Answer potential questions that visitors may have, such as ones around product availability, brand reliability, shipping times, and return policies. 

Make your target audience feel smart for finding your solution. Clarify what value the product or page provides, and convince users that they've found exactly what they need.

If the landing page is only for paid ads or email campaigns, then search engine optimization (SEO) should not be a priority. Regardless, make sure to add canonical tags to avoid issues with Google and other search engines seeing duplicate content.

7. Reduce load time 

Follow these steps to optimize your page’s load time to improve your SEO

Doing this might also increase general usability and conversions while decreasing bounce rates from all marketing channels.

8. Prioritize your CTAs

Prominently placed calls-to-action to capture your customers’ attention. Use contrasting colors and follow brand guidelines. Consider placing one of the CTAs above the fold, meaning that it’s immediately visible when the page loads, setting expectations.

Also, think about the copy that you use in and around the CTA. Convey key messages, and communicate what solution you offer. Make sure it’s honest so they know what awaits them behind the button.

9. Include reviews or testimonials

Customer testimonials and reviews may boost your landing page with social proof. I spoke to Leon Heuser, CEO of ReviewForest, a platform that helps business owners get more reviews by planting a tree for each one:

You can embed reviews from review platforms like Google onto your landing pages:

As a lower-tech solution, Leon recommends collecting testimonials and customer feedback directly, outside of review platforms. Simply set up a time to speak to them or send them a questionnaire. Video testimonials, where you record a video call, can be a great way to show that there’s a real person behind the review.

Best apps to use for optimizing Shopify landing pages

Heatmaps

See customer behavior with heatmaps and scrollmaps. With enough detailed data, you can see exactly how people interact with your landing pages. 

• Consider starting with the free plans of Shopify apps like Lucky Orange and Retter, as well as Datafly to an extent. Industry stalwart, Crazy Egg, doesn’t currently offer a free plan.

Popular apps with free plans

Landing page builders with more than 2,500 reviews from Shopify store owners:

• PageFly is a landing page builder with a drag-and-drop interface and templates for creating elegant, professional pages.

• GemPages also has a drag-and-drop interface with AI-powered features.

• Shogun has a similar offering as PageFly and GemPages with no need for coding.

• LayoutHub also offers a variety of templates and 24/7 customer support.

Other, similar page builders:

• EComposer’s offering is in line with the rest.

• Baea and Tapita offer chat support even on free plans.

• Automizely has lazy-loading capabilities for images.

• Veda was launched in 2023 and offers 3 themes with multiple landing pages and effects specifically for seasonal Halloween promotions.

• Zipify is a page builder that seeks to improve your sales funnel.

Specialized Shopify apps for adding sections:

• Puco lets you expand the number of sections for your store.

• Section Store is similar.

OpenStore does more than optimize your landing pages

If you have a Shopify store based in the United States, OpenStore can free up your time while you continue earning the same as now:

• Get guaranteed monthly payments based on your store’s current performance under your management.

• With experience managing nearly 50 Shopify stores, OpenStore’s team has worked in every market niche and knows how to optimize landing pages, in addition to all other operations in marketing, fulfillment, logistics, design, branding, and customer experience.

• Access full-service e-commerce management for 12 months. OpenStore Drive covers everything.