Change landing pages without re-deploying?
I'm validating a new product idea and one of the features is allowing people to make text changes to landing pages without having to re-deploy your landing page.
Basically you just put a script tag in your landing page and then add an ID to the element and voila, you can control it remotely.
Is this interesting as a feature? What else do you think would be useful to help in making landing pages convert better?
This sounds like an interesting feature to me, and I think it's validated by these two projects (neither is exactly the same, but they address a similar pain point)...
Maker (maker.co)
Builder (builder.io)
More here if you want to research: nocodelist.co/?categories=Landing Pages
Also, about the couple concerns in the comments... just my opinion, but... for SEO, there are lots of websites that use content dynamically loaded by the front end, and something as simple as swapping content on page load should get picked up by Google. If you get crazy and do weird workarounds, maybe not, but I think this was more of a concern 2 - 5 years ago than it is today.
For security, it's dangerous to output any random thing someone uploads, but if you put some basic security in place, you'll be totally fine (like don't allow it to execute scripts). So I think that's not a huge concern either.
Good luck!
Neat idea. An alternative you could consider is building a wrapper around something like Jekyll or Gatsby. These tools already provide pretty powerful templating using markdown for landing pages. If you could build a simple wrapper for non-techy people, you could take advantage of these existing tools while still adding value though a simple UI.
That's a great idea, thanks!
I would understand your product if you wanted to a/b test, but if you want to just change content that is what your CMS is for.
If you did want to a/b test you can use https://www.crazyegg.com/ab-testing
JS also slows the site down.
SEO issue.
I've looked into this because I wanted an easy way to change text from my phone on my now/links pages.
One of the concerns I'd have is SEO. Will Google be able to crawl the content?
yeah google's crawler executes javascript.
But I saw in one article it's still not perfect, so I wouldn't rely on it.
Sweet! I don't think Facebook's does, but the user can just hard code OG metadata.
great point, forgot about that!
Interesting idea, and lots of ways to execute it.
It'd be worried about performance and security, so definitely consider those aspects if you decide to go further with the idea.
Also, have you thought of any specific use-cases? I'm thinking maybe counters could be interesting - but beyond that, it might be too context-dependent to make a product out of..
Thanks for your comment!
The initial use cases is really simple.
I personally have 18 landing pages for products in various stages. It's convenient for me to change the headline and title of the above-the-fold content from one central location to see how that changes converstion rates.
On the security front, what are you worried about specifically?
If you're trying to measure change in conversions shouldn't you use A/B software to do that? Rather than just changing it -> waiting to see results -> change again etc.
Security: Nothing specific, but rendering content from another service/product on a website you own should obviously always be approached with caution - XSS is one thing, but putting the source of content in the hands of a third-party in this way needs to be seriously evaluated - what if the product itself is breached on a DB level, or somewhere in the middle? What if the service goes down - am I going to loose sales until the service is restored? You know, things like that.
So it's for A/B testing? Since my original message, I thought about a funny use-case for hyper-relevant copy changes, e.g. Temporarily adding a congratulation message to the winner of a sport, or react to some political/natural/cultural event.
Something else to maybe consider is this: how do people solve your use-cases right now? If landing pages are done right, changing the wording of copy and redeploying should only take a few minutes as it is.
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For sure, it didn't take long to do, but it's just one of say 6 features so far, and one that I've found to be useful just for my own projects.
but now that you've got me thinking about it, a cool product would be to turn any website into one you could remotely update (for non developers). Something like