A clever landing page design is more than delightful visuals and persuasive copy; it’s a crucial tool that will determine the success of a marketer's efforts.Today we’re going to share with you our landing page best practices, along with many examples that will help you find inspiration and highlight the value that will turn visitors into leads.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a web page with a specific purpose: it could be a stand-alone dedicated page that you are taken to when you click a Call to Action button, a social media link on an ad, or the homepage of a website. It is essential because it is the face of your business, the welcome at your door, the first impression that counts the most. Unlike other web pages, which have multiple goals, a landing page has only one goal and one call to action.

This page provides a brilliant opportunity to hold your visitors, catch their eye, inform them, and persuade them to choose your products or services. It gives you great control over your conversion process, it is the best option for your go-to marketing strategy, and it can significantly lower your costs to acquire a lead or sales.

What makes a good landing page design?

Building a landing page might seem easy, but there are a lot of things you have to keep in mind in order to provide the best user experience possible. Whether you’re creating it from scratch or using Squarespace landing page builder, it should be able to convey a clear, valuable message and give a strong offer.

High converting landing pages have one thing in common: they all identify exactly what the product or service offers, without any distracting elements. In order to achieve this, you will need not only thorough research, a killer headline, and a persuasive copy, but also a design that will make the visitors stop to look along with engaging visual elements that will make them stay.

As visual content is an essential part of the landing page, in this article we will focus on presenting landing page best practices from a design perspective. From our point of view, the recipe for success contains a pinch of interactivity and a series of engaging landing page animations that help to maximize visitor retention.

Web animation has become an essential part of landing page design, whether it’s used for microinteractions or stunning animated illustrations. As the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, your visuals will shape the visitor’s impression even before reading a single line of text. Needless to say, animated visuals will do the best job in drawing the eye to your CTA and engaging your audience in a fun and creative way. Now let’s have a look at our tips to bring your landing page to the next level.

Landing page best practices

1. Keep it simple

Finding the healthy balance between showing and telling can be a real challenge, but a landing page is all about simplicity and clear CTA. Animation offers a great opportunity to present more ideas in less space without killing the UX.

Handwriting effects, self-drawing lines, and animated text are attention-grabbing elements that will emphasize your ideas and give users the desire to stay longer on your page to read the whole sentence, or perhaps to scroll down and continue their journey.

2. Add dynamics to improve navigation

Create a prettier look with stunning animations that will load as the visitor scrolls through the page. The motions can be subtle or more noticeable, but they shouldn’t affect the loading time — this is why we always recommend that you use lightweight SVG animations instead of GIFs.

Check one of our best landing page examples below, which presents the mobile app animations. Here we used several types of animations with different goals: on the first fold, we show the results you can achieve by using the tool, then we emphasize g how amazing interactive app animations are. These are followed by a fun animated character to entertain visitors, but the example also supports the idea of having advanced tools. Finally, you have a live demo showing the tools asset library.

3. Tell a story

Never underestimate your power as a graphic designer to tell a great story. You can create emotional connection with clever interactive elements, cool demos, cute characters, and other strategic elements that are in line with the brand’s personality and tone of voice.

Copywriters have a limited space to clearly state a web value proposition in a few paragraphs, so design helps a lot when it comes to giving life to content. By setting up a visual hierarchy of elements, you can effectively influence the viewer’s perception of ideas and convert them as part of the story.

4. Optimize your SVG

A simple yet powerful landing page cannot exist without lightweight and crystal-clear visuals that won’t affect load times. Achieving this with SVG can be a piece of cake, as SVG animations are quite small in comparison to gifs or videos. However, when you have a lot of them, you will still need to do some optimization work in order to get the best possible load times.

Depending on the complexity of your animations, your code might require the browser to do more work before it can display the first-page render. Fortunately, there is a workaround to optimize your cool landing page animations so that they won’t cause any problem in terms of page speed and user experience. If you want to learn more about SVG optimizations, check out this dedicated article that will explain everything you need to know about it.

5. Show a demo

Besides telling a story, you should also demonstrate value: whether the page is offering a product or a service, users would be glad to see them in action in a real-life context.

The smartest way to do this is to add an explainer animation, a demo video, or a step-by-step guide to your hero section and place a CTA button below it.

As far as visuals are concerned, abstract concepts and less tangible topics offer more room for creative solutions For example, we used this animated astronaut floating in space on our homepage to represent our key values and mission: a revolutionary new way to animate characters and other illustrations with a few clicks. We chose this form of presentation instead of a generic demo in order to grab the viewer’s attention and demonstrate the results they can achieve by using our tool. Of course, showing people how your product works is always a good idea, so we also had a video presenting SVGator in action before changing it to the astronaut.

6. Conceal load times with fun

Nobody likes to wait, right? Although we try our best to have a fast loading and high converting landing page, there still might be some cases when waiting is inevitable. The good news is there is a solution for this, too: you can easily turn inevitable wait times into an entertaining and pleasant experience with animated preloaders. This interface element not only improves the overall user experience, but also prevents users from bouncing. With SVGator’s new API, you can programmatically control your preloader so that it will show the real-time loading process of your page.

7. Use animated icons

Conversion rates can be improved by even the tiniest details, like those aesthetically pleasing icons that are indispensable assets on a high converting landing page. Bring essential content to the forefront, attract attention to key elements, and save screen estate with clever animated icons. You can also make them interactive with hover effects or on-click/on-tap triggers.

8. Use white space

Strategic space placement has a cardinal role in creating a visual hierarchy of design elements, and it’s a true booster when it comes to user-friendliness. It improves readability by dividing and grouping ideas in separate sections, and it is especially useful on conversion-centered pages because it allows content to make more impact.

If your design element has more space around it, viewers are more likely to look at that one first. This is why we advise you to use plenty of macro white space at the first headline and CTA button at the top of your page, then smooth transitions between sections, ideas, and step-by-step process descriptions with macro white space.

9. Use contrasting colors

The design principle of contrasting colors applies to high-converting landing pages as well. Here we’re not talking about CTA button colors or testing different hues, and we’re not getting into “color psychology” that may or may not work. Marketers stuck to these ideas for a long time, but today we know that there is no one color or hue that can guarantee conversion.

We’re simply emphasizing the fact that choosing the right contrasting colors and being consistent with your design element may be the key to a successful landing page design.

Web animation has become an essential part of landing page design, whether it’s used for microinteractions or stunning animated illustrations.

10. Limit exit opportunities and distractions

Your page has a single conversion goal, and you want your visitors to be focused only on one action. That is why it is essential to avoid adding any internal or external links and not to mention other features or offers. You can also remove the navigation bar and exclude social buttons, or place them below the fold.

Your cool landing page animations are no exception to this, so make sure that they guide your visitors through the page and do not distract them from filling out the form, signing up or hitting the CTA button. You may also add an exit intent pop-up that offers another reason to stay on the page: this can be a compelling offer or related content that will make them change their mind.

Landing page examples we like

Now that you’ve learned about landing page best practices, let’s find some inspiration for your next project. We’ve put together this list of landing page examples to help.

Express VPN

Slack

We use Slack for daily communication, so it’s no surprise that we are quite familiar with its website. It’s not only a cool app, but it also serves as a great landing page example. Using trust value symbols right at the top of the page is a brilliant idea; we also love the dashboard screenshot, the nice demo video, and the cool landing page animations!

Stripe

Stripe is a genius not only at financial services but also at landing page design. The animated gradients were a risky choice, but they still perform well and give the page a special look. If you want to learn more about animating gradients, check out this article on color banding. The only thing we’ve done differently: the CTA could have been a bit larger.

Shopify

This landing page design clearly follows the rule of keeping it simple. Adding a bit of motion to the simple graphics might have been a good idea here, but the clear interface and the concise CTA are doing a great job at attracting new customers to start their free trial. This hue of green inspires feelings of safety, harmony and growth.

Mailchimp

Wow, look at that sunny yellow! Mailchimp’s official brand color also looks nice on the background, and it’s definitely an eyecatcher. The hero image is also funny and impossible to ignore. We love that each visual loads on scroll into view, adding dynamics to the page.

Hopper

This popular travel app has an amazing animated background illustration, lovely colors, cute icons, and nice font. The CTA immediately sends you to the app download page, which also has a really cool design!

Absurd

This simple yet powerful black and white design gives you an idea of what kind of vector artworks you can find here if you become a member. The playful, surrealistic illustrations are amazing, unique, and truly creative! You can also preview design packs before committing to subscribe.

Orangina

This one is full of landing page animations, wherever you move the cursor! It is quite the opposite of Absurd; it has a vibrant, playful, and really colorful product landing page that represents the brand’s personality. However, due to many distracting factors, it may be a bit hard to navigate, and the CTAs are not so clear at first sight.

Codecards

Darkmode never seems to go out of style, and it’s one of our personal favorites. This page helps developers to easily learn new coding concepts in a fun way. The visuals are on point by showing the actual play cards, the copy is clear and concise, and the CTA button is just so cool!

SVGator

Contrasting colors, darkmode, a set of colorful animated icons and interactive elements make this landing page really effective and appealing. We tried to demonstrate the versatile nature of animated icons and add visuals that load on hover, so that viewers can have a bit of fun.

If you’d like to share with us your cool landing page animations, don’t hesitate to contact us at contact@svgator.com or via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.