Building landing pages in Rails 6: Worth the hassle?
You need a landing page to showcase the PoC, regardless of what you are building.
If you are a dev and building a SaaS app, it's tempting to build the landing page as well. But I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle. You have to take care of all the styling, photos, etc.
An alternative is use other landing page builder, like carrd.co. The root domain is routed there, and set up a subdomain, like app.example.com to point to the Rails server.
Any people are using this approach? Any pros and cons?
Absolutely yes!
Getting started with a simple MVC for your landing page in Rails is fast. I've always built my own landing page and heavily customized customer onboarding (far beyond what you can do with a landing page builder). Take a look at https://www.organisely.app/
Happy to chat if you have any specific tech questions
In my opinion, all of these ready made landing page builders are slow, contain lots of unnecessary requests, and pull data from 3rd party domains. In short, they won't work for the majority of tech-savvy users that use ad- and tracking-blockers.
For a product targeting normal people, I believe the landing page builders are good enough. But for a SaaS, that would be a huge red flag for me if their own marketing page is slow and disrespects my privacy.
For example, people regularly benchmark Heroku.com to decide if they want to sign up for the Heroku PaaS service. Technically, there is no reason why these should be related, but people assume that if one part is cheap and slow, so will be the hidden components.
I have my own way of doing landing pages where code is just rendering a translation file that is edited in-house by marketing. It’s a win-win, I can have a fast loading and minimal-code landing page and they can edit the content
https://twitter.com/tylertringas/status/1250521285630836741 1.8k likes probs best to listen to them.
I built https://versoly.com/ for SaaS landing pages and marketing sites.
From the tweet, I learned
Learned something new today. Thanks. @volkandkaya
I disagree. Using an nginx proxy, it is quite easy to redirect every page that exists there into, say, WordPress, while redirecting every other URL into your rails SaaS app.
Whether there's any seo benefits to having things on the same domain, I don't know.
Agree with @fxtentacle. We've been using a 'Frankenstein' approach for a while for one of our products.
we are currently transitioning a WP blog to Rails. Started off with the blogs/index page (migrated it to Rails) and then set up Cloudflare to act as a proxy directing incoming traffic to either Rails (if
/blog) or WP otherwise. The Cloudflare setup for such proxying is fairly straightforward: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/reverse-proxy-two-different-origin-servers-cnames-for-the-same-domain-using-page-rules/54058