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Is Landing Page Hell Worth It?
By
swyx
October 29, 2017
Is Landing Page Hell Worth It?
Discuss this article or ask me any questions you may have.
I've been through this hell and always end up with a simple solution, do it yourself.
Instead of using Wordpress, which requires either a lot of setup or money (hosted) I use a completely free solution. First I create a new Jekyll (or Hugo) site and deploy it to Netlify with Netlify CMS. They offer free hosting, free SSL, free CMS, free A/B testing and etc. The only thing that costs money is the domain name and the costs for a template.
If somebody will find this useful I can try to write up a post about how to setup your landing page like this.
I've been using an HTML template (http://levelstheme.com/) hosted for free on GitHub Pages for a lot of my projects. 👍
yeah. i pretty much have concluded this. how come the dedicated SaaS solutions don't solve this in a simple way haha.
i didnt know that netlify does AB testing. that is very very interesting.
Recently found Netlifys A/B test which they call split test. Pretty cool feature. Test variants are version control tags so going specific version is easy as is going backwards
As a technical + non-technical team, we've tried Striking.ly, Instapage, Unbounce, and then finally settled on Webflow.
Pretty happy so far with the results. There's templates to get you started quickly, and the ability to drop down to HTML/CSS if necessary. Subscription is pretty cheap compared to other marketer-focused services out there.
interesting. getting a lot more options here which is great!
Wow. That does sound like hell. I knew there were limitations with the Saas platforms but I didn't know there were so many hurdles just to test an idea out.
FWIW, I've done it through Wordpress and DIY - each one has their own pains of getting everything setup the way you want them to. I haven't found anyone that's super simple but is also free. I don't know if it's a market worth chasing for.
Wordpress was great because there are some free templates and there are also some premium ones. In the end, I purchased a premium one, tweaked the colors/logos and placed a Mailchimp form - maybe there's a way to get Stripe integrated that easily as well?
appreciate the sympathy haha. I think this is potentially worth someone on IH tackling. I'd pay for a straightforward landing page that collects money for sure.
This is awesome! I remember having the same issues when I built my first landing page. Now, landing pages are what I specialize in. I even created a free course to teach others how to build them. If you ever need feedback on a page, feel free to reach out.
If you are a developer, I'm confused as to why you don't do something yourself and drop in CC processing code from Stripe.com and or MailChimp.com widget and call it a day? Is the hard part coming up with the design or something else?
Oh man. Every time I read something like this it fuels the fire in me to build a Wordpress replacement that makes this stuff as easy as saying yes.
We at Ridj-it just ended our Unbounce subscription ($99/month) as we found a cheaper option, Wix. I would be interested in anybody else's opinion on Wix. Our marketing person and graphic designer already like its usability much more than Unbounce, and this frees up our developers to work on our platform development. We got a few customers with Unbounce by integrating MailChimp, and that took three days to work through. Basically Unbounce was a pain to use, as the switch between mobile and desktop layout was locked into each other.
We're using landing pages as stand-in static pages, as we don't have the time/skills to do it from scratch. Eventually we hope to have more people on staff that can do it directly from our platform, but until then landing pages are a great way to let your marketing/design team pull ahead while freeing up developers. Thanks for your article!
I believe that IndieHacker landing page fails because I had a hard time exactly what IndieHacker was about (the marketing failed).
chill man
lol @swyx. Yes. I think I took things a bit too far.
Great article!
I went through a similar struggle with my landing page, rationalising that it would be much quicker using a Wordpress theme than DIY. Ended up with theme installation errors that took the hosting site's live chat help to fix.
Finally got it up and running. Patrics is right, you do underestimate the time it takes to customise your page even with them theme in place, but it didn't take more than a few hours to get right. If it wasn't for the installation error I would recommend using WP for a landing page as I am happy how the landing paged turned out :)
awesome stuff. im not a WP guy so shamefully they werent even on my radar of options. are you able to take money through some sort of plugin? can you recommend any? i’m basically only familiar with using WP as a blog so any pointers appreciated.
Hey, total disclosure: I'm co-founder of ProteusThemes and you can read my IH story here: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/proteusthemes
If you'd be looking into the WP-oriented solution, I'd like you to check the GrowthPress theme our team has built for exactly your purpose: http://demo.proteusthemes.com/growthpress/
The landing pages are included, like https://demo.proteusthemes.com/growthpress/landing-page/
The demo might seem huge, but you can easily throw away all the pages you don't need and make it a single landing page. And that's exactly what I did when setting up (our new) product ProteusPay: https://proteuspay.com/
More than happy to give you (or any other fellow IH readers) a free month of GrowthPress theme a try.
To your question: there are many options to collect money using WordPress. While ProteusPay (mentioned above) we've developed a possible solution, I'd not recommend it for a quick prototyping because it's quite advanced and specific (but well worth to take a look at it in later stages).
Instead, use something like Gravity Forms or Calera Forms with their Stripe add-on and you're all set: https://calderaforms.com/downloads/caldera-forms-stripe-add-on/
I hope you don't find this spammy, but I feel that I can genuinely help. As said above, mail me to my first name at proteusnet.com and I'm more than happy to provide you with the GrowthPress theme for free for a month.
Primoz
hey Primoz! just checked out your interview. wow, what a journey. I have gone with another landing page SaaS for now but will definitely keep you in mind when I do use WP in future (i'm sure I will). Please don't feel spammy about self promotion here, I think we all understand how it is, you're just trying to help with the best thing you know which is your own product!
Hey, thanks for reading the interview. Yeah, just ping me if you need any help with the WP. I'm working with it 11 years now (maybe also time to try something else :D)
Or even something like that (didn't try it out, but looks quite polished and 10k active installs + good ratings): https://wordpress.org/plugins/stripe/
yes you can take money through a number of plugins.
I haven't used payment capture on my site so I can't recommend any specific plugins but i'm sure there will be one that will fill your needs.
Thanks for the summary. I think that it is a very valid point that it takes quite a lot of effort to test whether SaaS solutions are suitable for your needs. One other site that could be worth looking at is wix.com
Out of curiousity, what are your requirements for a landing page?
well, im finding out as i go along and its not been fun. i’ll give wix a try!
so far i want:
are there any requirements i’m not thinking of?
I feel you ;-)
Thanks for the write up, maybe or hopefully you save somebody else time and energy.
For me the quickest way to a landingpage ist actually spinning up just another Wordpress Installation with some template. Still I underestimate the time it takes to customize the style and content.
i havent thought of wordpress yet!! that could be a good compromise between diy and saas.
I guess that for me a Wordpress solution would also be very time-consuming as the customisation would be quite a bit of work if you don't want the blogging nature to shine through. It is easy to spin up a WP site, but I think that most people underestimate the time it takes to do proper customisation as you write :-)
True. I think this is the main reason for the common advice: use the tools you know.
Btw. There are a few landingpage like themes available for free or for a one time fee and most WP site builder plugins or themes come with a great set of content elements which are of non-blogging-nature
Btw. where can we see the end result? Did I miss the link?
nope i just didnt want to self promote, this is more about the experience. anyway i kinda wanna run a few experiments on it first :p
I understand, just courious ;-)
Thanks @swyx.
This article saved me hours~
I just use straight up html.
Nothing beats the flexibility of just cp/pasting divs in sublime and testing out layout changes in seconds.
http://app.moduleframework.com/#
This is also really convenient!
This resonated a lot having just been through this hell. It was worth it though...
Decided to go with Landbot to spark a conversation with potential users and gather feedback as well as their emails prior to launch. The service is in Beta so it's a bit tricky to setup but leads have been pretty solid and people seem to enjoy it. Check it out for yourself: https://surge.fm
I saw on ProductHunt there were several Landing Page creation services, you might want to check there. I'm sure this problem must already be solved.
Thanks for the benchmark!
Any feedback on using ProductHunt's Upcoming feature compared with traditional option solutions?
Have you tried Bubble yet https://bubble.is/? It is $16/month if you want to launch, if not it's free. There's stripe integrations, and I think much more customizations you can do yourself
No I have not. will check it out! surprisingly this is the first I've heard of it.
Bubble is mostly known for building MVPs without code, but if you can build an MVP on it you can certainly do a landing page too :)
We are the largest template builders for Bubble, we do mostly focus on templates with rich functionality like AirBNB or Uber Clones etc, but we have quite a few landing page templates too. And you can sure add stripe integration and customize it the way you want. It'd be slightly more difficult than LeadPage implementation but you will not face any limitatations or frustrating. Check out https://zeroqode.com?ref=IH
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
i am a fan of ajkln (spelling?) so i actually did check out Carrd. however it seems to just contain profile page designs and didnt have the hard sell aspect that i wanted.
if someone pays me i have the supply to fulfill it, no question. my hustle is kind of a "spare inventory" play.