What is a Home Page?
Let’s get started with a simple example. Think about website Home Page as your house entrance which opens up into the other rooms and living spaces inside the house. For a person to enter the house, one needs to pass through the front door and then move to the other parts of the house, based on their need. That’s precisely what a website home page does. It acts as the entry point for visitors, where the user gets a quick overarching view of the business offerings and then can move to an internal page, based on their interest or relevance of the service or product.
As per the web development best practices, every home page should contain basic information regarding what you do and how your customers will benefit from it. Knowing that you’ve got only a few seconds to win or lose a visitor, the most important question that needs to be addressed on the home page is- “what’s in it for me (customer)?” In short, the goal of a home page is to educate the visitor about the business offerings and tout the visitor to navigate to other pages to learn more about the services. That also explains why websites should have easy navigation so that visitors can easily find a specific product or service without having to perform a microscopic search.
What is a Landing Page?
Continuing with the earlier analogy, if a website home page is the entrance to a house with multiple rooms, consider landing page as a standalone room made for a specific marketing goal. Understanding the difference between a home page and landing page is important, especially if you are planning for an inbound marketing campaign.
As the name suggests, landing page is where a visitor or a prospect “lands” by clicking on one of your ads or links placed in the online landscape. It is distinct from a website home page in many aspects. While the main purpose of a home page is to make the visitor aware of your offerings and provide navigation to internal pages, the main purpose of every landing page is to convert visitors into leads. This is why landing pages are designed in a unique fashion with no navigation as it helps to keep the visitor focused on a single solution and avoid any sort of distraction on the page. Though this may be of the same domain, the landing page ideally will not have no global navigation even to the primary website. Apart from the design, the super compelling content of the landing page prods the visit to perform the desired action such as download an eBook, subscribe to a mailing list, request a demo, purchase a product etc.
