I was in a masterclass recently where the “guru” kept interchanging the words landing page, sales page and webpage. All when talking about the same single page.
By the end of the session, my brows could not furrow any further. And I’m in marketing!
I felt genuinely sorry for the other attendees, who left with far more confusion than they arrived with. But I reckon this kind of mix-up is pretty common. So let me clear a few things up.
First, some definitions
A webpage is any page that lives within your website. Your About page, your Services page, your Contact page…all webpages. They’re part of a bigger ecosystem, they have navigation menus, links to other pages, and their job is mostly to inform.
A landing page is a standalone page with one single goal: get someone to take one specific action. Sign up for your newsletter. Download your freebie. Register for your webinar. There’s no navigation. No links pulling people elsewhere. Just one clear ask.
A sales page is a landing page’s more persuasive sibling. It’s specifically designed to convert someone into a paying customer. It does the heavy lifting of selling: addressing objections, building desire, making the case for why this offer, right now.
Same family. Very different jobs.
The “shopping centre” problem
A client recently ran her first paid ad campaign. She’d spent money on the creative, nailed the copy, and was feeling good. Then she sent all that traffic straight to her homepage.
And… crickets.
Sending someone to your homepage is like dropping them in the middle of a shopping centre and walking away. There’s too much to look at. Too many directions to go. No clear next step.
Your homepage has to work hard for everyone. First-time visitors, warm leads, past clients, people who stumbled across you from a Google search. It can’t be optimised for one person doing one thing.
A landing page can.
This is especially important if you’re running paid ads. Every dollar you spend sending traffic to your homepage instead of a dedicated landing page is a dollar working against you.
The no-nav rule
If you take one thing from this post, make it this:
Landing pages should not have a navigation menu.
As tempting as it is to whack on a button to your main website, remember that every link you add to a page is an exit ramp. When someone clicks away to read your About page or check out your other services, you’ve lost the moment. The whole point of a landing page is to remove distractions and guide someone toward a single decision.
No nav. One goal. One button.
But do you actually need a landing page?
If you’re a small service business, you might be wondering if this even applies to you.
Short answer: it depends on what you’re promoting.
If you’re running a workshop, launching a new offer, growing your email list, or running any kind of campaign, then yes, a dedicated landing page will almost always outperform sending people to your general website.
But if someone just wants to learn about you and what you do? Your website handles that. That’s literally what it’s there for.
And for a lot of small service businesses, your services page can absolutely do the job of a sales page, as long as it’s written and structured that way. The best services pages aren’t just descriptions of what you do. They speak directly to the right person, address what they’re worried about, and make it easy to take the next step. When a services page is doing all of that, the line between “services page” and “sales page” gets wonderfully blurry.
What to put on a page that actually converts
Whether it’s a dedicated sales page or a services page doing double duty, the ingredients are the same:
- A headline that speaks to your ideal client’s problem or desire
- Benefits, not just features
- Social proof — testimonials, results, reviews
- FAQs that address common objections
- A clear, easy call to action
The format might differ. The goal doesn’t.
The one question to ask before you build anything
Before you create any page, ask yourself:
Who is this for, and what’s the one thing I want them to do when they land here?
If the answer is “several different people” and “a few different things”, you’ve got a webpage. Build it into your website.
If the answer is one person, one action, you need a landing page or a sales page. And if budget means that lives on your services page for now? Make sure it’s written like one.
