Landing Page vs Homepage: Which One Should You Send Traffic To?
Sending campaign traffic to your homepage asks the visitor to find their own way. What changes when you send it to a landing page instead, and when it should not.
Somebody in the meeting will say the fold does not matter any more, because people scroll now. They are half right, and the half they have wrong is the expensive half.
People do scroll. They decide whether to scroll first, and they decide from whatever is on screen the moment the page settles. On a phone that is a strip a few hundred pixels tall, and four things have to fit inside it.
Where the fold actually sits now
There is no single fold, and has not been for years. There is a range, and you design for the bottom of it. On a phone the visible area is smaller than most people picture: the browser’s address bar takes a strip at the top, the operating system reserves one at the bottom, and a sticky header removes another slice before a word of yours appears.
What is left is roughly the space a large postcard covers. Everything below it still exists, but people only reach it if what sits above gives them a reason to.
The desktop fold is generous by comparison, and that is the trap. Designers work on desktop, argue about the fold on desktop, and then the traffic arrives on a phone held one-handed at a bus stop. Design for the small fold and the large one looks after itself. It does not work in reverse.
The four elements that must be visible
The same four, whether the page sells roof repairs or accountancy software.
What this is, in the reader’s own words. One line naming the thing on offer, in the vocabulary the reader would use for it. Not a tagline. A statement. Emergency roof repairs across Greater Manchester. If somebody read that line and nothing else, they should know whether they are in the right place.
The qualifier that answers the next question. Whatever the reader asks second: how much, how fast, where, for whom. A price, a turnaround, a service area, a named audience. It is the line separating a page that sounds like every competitor from one you could actually ring.
The action. A button, sized for a thumb, saying what happens when it is pressed. Get a quote beats Submit. Call 0161 496 0000 beats Contact. It must be visible without scrolling and comfortable to reach; one tucked into a phone’s top right corner is technically present and practically awkward.
One piece of evidence. A photograph of the actual work, premises or product. Not a stock handshake. It does two jobs: it shows the business is real, and it shows what the reader is buying.
That is the set. If a fifth element is fighting for room, one of these four is losing space it needs.
What people wrongly put up there
The company name at billboard size. Your name means a great deal to you and nothing to a first-time visitor. It belongs in the header at ordinary size, not across a third of the opening screen.
A carousel. A slider settles an internal argument (four departments each wanted the top slot) by showing each message to a fraction of visitors for a few seconds. On a phone, most have scrolled past before slide two.
A welcome sentence. Welcome to our website. We are a family-run firm established in 1994. Both true, both better placed further down.
A cookie banner sitting over the button. Invisible in the design file, unmissable on a real device, which is why it survives to launch.
For a quick read on what experienced designers reserve that space for, open a few finished templates and look only at the opening screen. How a theme such as Kendytheme arranges its top view shows what its designers judged worth the room.
The scroll cue nobody designs
A page that ends tidily at the fold reads as the end of the page. If the hero section is exactly the height of the screen, with a clean edge at the bottom, it looks complete. A reader with no reason to think there is more will not go looking.
The fix is not an animated arrow. It is letting the next section be cut off. Put the top of an image, the first line of a heading, or the start of a second block of text into the last visible strip, so the screen ends mid-thought. A partly visible thing is a far stronger invitation than a symbol pointing downwards.
This is the commonest reason a full-height hero underperforms. Nothing about it is wrong except that it finishes too neatly, and neatness there reads as a full stop.
Testing on a real phone, not a resized window
A narrow browser window on a laptop is not a phone. No address bar eating vertical space, no home indicator, no thumb, no glare, and usually taller in proportion than a real handset, so it hands you room you do not have.
Open the page on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wi-fi, and hold it the way a customer would. Then check three things. Is the button reachable with the thumb of the hand holding the device, or does the phone have to be shuffled? Does the cookie banner cover anything that matters? And when a form field is tapped and the keyboard slides up, is anything still readable behind it?
Then do it again on the oldest, smallest phone in the office. That handset is not an edge case. It is a customer, and the version of your page with the least room to make its argument.
A before and after
A physiotherapy clinic’s old opening screen: the practice logo, a rotating banner of three stock images, and the words Welcome to the practice. Everything else needed a scroll.
The replacement, in the same space: Sports injury physiotherapy in Leeds city centre. Beneath it, Same-week appointments, from £45. Then a Book an appointment button, and a photograph of the treatment room with the door open. Below that, deliberately half cut off, the first line of the section on what a first appointment involves.
The clinic did not change. Only what a visitor learned in the first two seconds.
Most of this is arrangement rather than invention: deciding what earns the top of the page, then moving it there. We build pages that way from the start, and on sites we look after it is usually an amendment, not a rebuild.
