If you’ve been looking for a quick and easy way to create high-converting landing pages, you might have heard of Leadpages.
It’s one of the most well-known (and affordable) landing page builders on the market and is a popular choice amongst small and medium-sized businesses that want to capture more leads. However, that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for everyone.
In this in-depth Leadpages review, we’ll be taking a closer look at Leadpages’ powerful set of features, exploring its pros and cons, and ultimately determining whether or not it lives up to its claim of being “the single greatest tool to transform clicks into customers.”
By the end of this review, you’ll understand exactly what Leadpages has to offer and whether or not it’s the right fit for your business.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Leadpages Overview
Leadpages is a conversion marketing platform built for small businesses. It makes it easy to build high-converting landing pages (plus other lead-capture elements like pop-ups and alert bars) and provides you with a suite of tools to help you land more conversions.
There are a lot of similar landing page platforms out there that can do the same (like Unbounce, and Instapage), but there are a couple of things that make Leadpages different.
First off, it’s very affordable. It’s one of the best reasonably-priced conversion platforms on the market, with plans at least 4x cheaper than some of its competitors (ClickFunnels, I’m looking at you).
Secondly, it doesn’t aim to be an ‘all in one platform.’ Unlike some other platforms in the same space, Leadpages believes that ‘all you need’ is better than ‘all in one.’
As such, it has a much narrower feature set. Rather than replacing your whole marketing stack, Leadpages is primarily a landing page builder and is designed to work alongside other tools.
But unlike other dedicated page builders, Leadpages is all about conversions. Rather than just enabling you to build a regular landing page, content built on Leadpages is optimized to compel your visitors to take action.
Leadpages is also one of the oldest landing page builders on the market. It was founded back in 2012, so it’s been around for a long time. Since then, it’s continually improved and expanded its feature set in order to overtake the competition.
We’ll take a close look at each of these features later on, but first, here’s a quick overview of the highlights:
- Modern landing page builder. The heart and soul of Leadpages is its landing page builder, which enables you to put together and customize high-converting landing pages in an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
- High-quality templates. Leadpages has a huge library of free and paid page templates designed by professionals and optimized for conversions.
- Alert bars. Create, customize, and publish attention-grabbing alert bars to any landing page in minutes.
- Pop-ups. Build and publish pop-up forms, then automatically display them on your landing pages or based on user actions.
- Website builder. Leadpages recently added a new website builder, so you can now create your entire conversion-focused website on the platform.
- Split testing tools. Run split tests and multivariate tests to compare variations of your landing pages and find out which performs best.
- Robust analytics. Leadpages provides extensive in-dashboard analytics to help you keep track of your campaign performance.
- Extensive integrations. Leadpages integrates with many different third-party tools, including many payment processors, marketing tools, and CMS platforms. They even offer a dedicated Leadpages WordPress plugin for easy WP integration.
Leadpages Features
We signed up for Leadpages to try it out for ourselves. Below, we’ll share our experience using the platform and reveal what we liked and what we didn’t like about it.
Leadpages User-Friendly Wizard
When you first sign up for Leadpages, you’ll be greeted by a user-friendly setup wizard to help you get started. The setup wizard will ask you a few questions about your business and goals in order to point you in the right direction.
You’ll be asked about your level of expertise in digital marketing, your business model and industry, and what you plan on using Leadpages for.
In the past, Leadpages would use this information to recommend a selection of landing pages you might want to use, but it looks like they’ve since scrapped that feature – so feel free to skip any questions you don’t want to answer.
Finally, it’ll ask what you want to make first.
Let’s start by selecting landing pages.
Leadpages Templates
Selecting landing pages will bring you to the template library – a huge catalog of professionally-designed landing page templates. You can also reach this page by navigating to Landing Pages > Create a New Landing page from the main dashboard:
Here, you’ll find templates for pretty much any kind of page you can think of. There are giveaway page templates, checkout page templates, about page templates, standard lead capture page templates, webinar templates… you name it, they’ve got it.
To help you sort through the huge catalog, you can filter pages by page type (i.e. checkout pages, about pages, etc.), industry (i.e. automotive, health and fitness, etc.), style, color, and more.
I’d recommend sorting them by Conversion Rate to find the designs that’ll bag you the most conversions. The guys at Leadpages have run thousands of tests and used those insights to determine which templates generate the greatest conversion rates and ranked them accordingly.
In the past, the quality of templates on Leadpages didn’t quite live up to the likes of Unbounce and Instapage, but they’ve definitely improved in recent years. Now, they’re a force to be reckoned with.
Once you’ve found a template you like the look of, you can hover it to open up a Preview in full-screen or click Start building to open it in the editor.
Leadpages Landing Page Builder
Once you’ve chosen a template, you’ll be prompted to give your page a name. After that, click Continue, and this will open up the landing page builder (it might take a few seconds).
The landing page builder is very much the heart and soul of Leadpages. If you’ve ever used a general-purpose page builder on WordPress or elsewhere, it should look pretty familiar.
It’s designed to be as beginner-friendly as possible so that anyone can create stunning pages without having to mess around with code.
In the main portion of the screen, you’ll see a live preview of how your page currently looks. You can move elements around the page by dragging and dropping them to a new spot, and they’ll automatically ‘snap’ into position.
As you can see illustrated above, you can’t move different elements around the page freely like you can with some other page builders like Instapage.
Instead, you’re limited to set positions. This is because Leadpages uses a row and column structure to organize elements on the page, much like WordPress page builders.
This lack of creative freedom is one of the main drawbacks of Leadpages. We’ll get to the others shortly but first, let’s explore the rest of the interface.
On the left sidebar, there are five tabs: Layout, Sections, Widgets, Styles, and Settings.
Under the Layout tab, you can make changes to each section of the page (i.e. the header, hero, footer, etc.). You can toggle the visibility of any section on or off, add rows or columns, change styling elements like background, padding, and more.
You can even add animations to make certain sections slide, fade, or bounce in. This is a neat feature that can really take your pages to the next level.
The Sections tab lets you drag and drop new sections into your page. There are various section types to choose from, including FAQs, Call to Actions, Features/Services, Pricing tables, and more.
There are also several pre-populated templates for each type of section, which you can drag and drop onto the page and customize as necessary.
Under the Widgets tab, you can drag and drop individual elements (these are like blocks in WordPress) onto the page. Again, there are a variety of widgets to choose from, including images, videos, buttons, forms, icons, progress bars, social ‘like’ buttons, countdown timers, checkout widgets (Pro version only), and more.
The form widget is pretty great, which is good news as the quality of your opt-in forms makes a big difference in conversion rates.
Within the form settings page, you can customize every aspect of your form, change the fields, integrate it with your email marketing or webinar platform, and choose what happens after a user submits their information.
For example, you can set it up so that after they click submit, they’re sent to a thank you page automatically or emailed a file (useful for setting up lead magnets)
Unfortunately, the widget selection as a whole wasn’t quite as varied as I’d hoped. I’d have liked to see a carousel or gallery widget, and maybe even a Google Maps and click-to-call widget.
Under Styles, you can change things like page fonts, backgrounds, and button colors across the page. Alternatively, you can click any individual element on the page to change the styling directly.
For example, clicking a text box will open a text settings screen where you can change the font, size, spacing, etc.
There are 60+ popular fonts to choose from, but if you want to use a different one, you can upload up to 10 of your own custom fonts in the Brand tab of your Leadpages account.
Under the Settings tab, you can change the SEO page title, description, and page tags. You can also change social sharing settings, add tracking codes like Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics, and more.
At the top of the page builder screen, you’ll also see a Leadmeter bar.
This is a cool built-in optimization feature that automatically assesses how well-optimized your page is for conversions and lets you know how to improve.
For example, it lets you know if buttons on your page aren’t easily readable or if you have too many form fields.
And if that’s not enough guidance for you, you can even request expert feedback from the marketing gurus at Leadpages using the new Expert Feedback button in the top-right corner. All you have to do is click the button and submit a form to request a free 5-10 minute video review of your page, delivered within 2 days.
Once you’re done editing your page, you can Preview it to see how it looks on different devices: mobile, tablet, and desktop.
While all pages are fully-responsive (so they should show up well on any device), you can’t change how your pages look on different devices by editing the mobile and tablet versions independently.
You can choose to hide certain sections on certain devices in the Section edit screen – but that’s pretty much all you can do when it comes to device-specific display settings.
If you’re happy with the preview, you can hit Publish to publish it to a Leadpages subdomain.
Alternatively, you can connect your own custom domain instead or upload the pages to your existing website by copy and pasting in a code snippet (or, if your site is built on WordPress, through the WordPress Leadpages plugin).
Before we wrap up this section, I also had a few other gripes about the page builder worth mentioning. My main issue was the responsiveness. It felt a little sluggish on the whole, and things like previewing the page seemed to take way longer than they should.
The page builder also wasn’t as flexible as some other tools I’ve tried in the past. There are limits to what you can do.
For example, you can only minimize spacing to a certain extent; you can’t embed forms built outside of Leadpages within your pages, and, as we mentioned earlier, you can’t move elements freely around the page. Overall, it just felt a bit boxed in.
The bottom line: we liked the easy animations and integrated optimization checker (Leadmeter), but on the whole, Leadpages builder wasn’t quite up to scratch. It felt sluggish and wasn’t as flexible as we’d have liked.
A/B Split Testing
If you want to test out multiple variations of your landing pages, you can do so with Leadpages split testing tools (only available on Pro and Advanced plans)
From your dashboard, just head to Landing Pages > Create New Split Test.
From there, you’ll be able to create different versions of your page and control how much of your website traffic gets sent to each variant. For example, you can send 50% of your traffic to page and 50% to page B.
Leadpages will take care of the rest for you. The test will collect data about how visitors interact with each page to determine which performs best. Once you know that, you can use the version of your page that lands you the most conversions.
Leadpages Website Builder
In 2019, Leadpages rolled out a brand new feature – a website builder. You can now use this to create your entire site from scratch (up to 100 pages) in much the same way as you would with website builders like Wix or Squarespace.
You can access the website builder from your dashboard by clicking Sites > Create New Site. As with landing pages, you can choose a professionally-designed website template to start from and customize it in the editor.
The website builder interface is almost identical to the page builder and uses the same general row and column structure. As with the page builder, you can add sections and widgets to each page.
The main difference is that the left sidebar now has one additional option: the Pages tab. You can add new pages to your site from this tab and choose whether to hide or show them on the primary navigation bar.
Obviously, the Leadpages website builder isn’t nearly as advanced or flexible as full-fledged website builders/CMS like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace, and you have very limited control over the functionality of your site.
The bottom line: I wouldn’t recommend building your website on Leadpages in most cases as it isn’t flexible or powerful enough to run an online business on.
That said, it’s very quick and easy to use, so it could be useful if you want to get a simple conversion-focused website up and running quickly to test out your online business concept and see if it’s viable before you build a more full-featured website on WordPress.
Leadpages Pop-Up Forms
Aside from pages, you can also use Leadpages to create pop-up forms. To do so, under Conversion Tools, just click Pop-Ups > Create New Pop-Up.
The pop-up editor is more or less the same as the page editor. You can change the layout, add sections and widgets, and change the design and settings of any element on the screen.
When you publish it, you can choose how to trigger it.
For example, you can set it as a timed popup, so it automatically shows up after the visitor has been on the page for a set amount of time, or as an exit-intent popup so that it’s triggered whenever it seems like they’re about to exit the page.
You can also trigger it when a button or text link is clicked.
Once you’ve selected your publishing options, you just grab the code snippet and use it to add your pop-up forms to any website page.
Leadpages Alert Bars
If you think popups are too intrusive, you might want to check out Leadpages Alert Bars feature instead. Alert Bars (you might know them better as notification bars) are short bars that appear at the top of the website page to promote offers and drive signups.
You’ve probably seen them before; they look like this:
You can build them on Leadpages under Conversion tools > Alert Bars > Create a New Alert Bar, which will open up the same editor interface again.
From here, you can select your preferred layout and change the text, colors, buttons, and settings as necessary.
Once you’re done, you can publish it to any landing page built with Leadpages or add it to your external website by pasting in the code snippet on your site.
Unfortunately, you can’t A/B test alert bars like you can with landing pages just yet, but maybe they’ll add that feature in the future.
Online Sales & Payments
If you plan on processing sales through Leadpages, you can do so using the new Checkout widget. It’s pretty basic, but it does the job.
You can add it to your Leadpages and forms to take payments for digital products, webinar access, or anything else. It also supports recurring payments, so you can automatically bill clients at set intervals.
Checkouts is powered by Stripe, a payment gateway that accepts all major credit cards and is free to set up (but you’ll pay a small fee per sale).
If you want to take payments through other payment gateways, or you need more advanced features to manage your eCommerce operations, you might want to look for an alternative checkout solution.
3rd-Party Integrations
Leadpages has native integrations with a wide variety of third-party marketing tools, including email marketing software like Mailchimp and GetResponse, Webinar platforms like WewbinarJam, and more.
You can also integrate it with dozens more apps and platforms via Zapier.
Leadpages also partners with Attract.io, which it integrates really nicely with. You can use Attract.io to create lead magnets, then deliver them to leads who opt-in to your forms through Leadpages.
And of course, one of the best things about Leadpages is how easily it integrates with WordPress. The Leadpages plugin allows you to publish the pages, pop-ups, and alert bars you build on Leadpages to WP without any headaches.
You can find the full list of supported integrations under the Integrations tab on your Leadpages dashboard.
Customer Support and Service
Leadpages has an extensive knowledge base full of how-to guides, tutorials, and FAQs. If you need help, this is your first port of call.
If you can’t find the answers you’re looking for there; you can reach out for tech support via live chat or email (or phone if you’re a Pro customer).
Unfortunately, live chat is only available between 9 AM and 5 PM rather than 24/7, but given that many other platforms don’t offer any live chat support option, we’re still impressed. It can also take up to 24 hours to get an email response to inquiries.
Leadpages Pricing
Leadpages offers two different pricing plans. Here’s what they include:
Standard
The Standard plan starts from as little as $37/month (currently discounted to $15/month) when billed annually and includes:
- 1 site
- Unlimited landing pages popups and alerts
- Unlimited traffic and leads
- 1 free custom domain (with annual subscriptions)
- Free hosting
- Mobile responsive site templates
- Lead notifications
- Chat and email support options
- Over 40 integrations
Pro
The Pro plan starts from $74/month (currently discounted to $30/month) when billed annually includes everything that comes with the standard plan plus:
- 3 sites
- Priority chat and email support
- Online sales and payment
- Unlimited A/B testing
The main drawback with the Standard plan is that you don’t get access to the A/B testing feature.
So, if you’re looking to take advantage of the A/B testing feature, then the Pro plan is a must. Fortunately, the A/B testing is unlimited when you purchase the Pro plan, so at least you don’t have to think about how many tests you run.
Similarly, you can create unlimited landing pages and popups with both plans, which is always a bonus and makes Leadpages a good value for money compared to other tools available.
The fact that Leadpages doesn’t cap your traffic and leads, or charge extra when you exceed certain limits, also sets it apart from many of its competitors. This can help to keep costs down if you run high-traffic sites.
Even though you have to pay for the Pro plan to access the A/B testing features, it’s still a more economical and scalable option than platforms like Unbounce, where the cost increases alongside your traffic and conversions.
Leadpages Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Very beginner-friendly
- Excellent selection of high-converting landing page templates
- Simple and easy A/B tests
- Integrates well with WordPress and many other third-party marketing tools
- Allows you to create high-converting popups and alert bars
- Build basic conversion-focused websites in half the time (great for testing out a concept)
Cons:
- No heatmapping
- Sluggish page editor
- Not very flexible
- Limited widget selection
- Unlimited A/B testing not included with all plans
Our Leadpages Review — Final Verdict
So, what’s the final verdict?
Overall, we’d absolutely recommend Leadpages to anyone looking for a simple, effective, conversion-focused landing page builder.
While it isn’t quite as powerful or flexible as other landing page platforms like Instapage and Unbounce, it’s a significant step up from free WordPress page builder plugins.
It’s also much more affordable than some of its competitors, with plans that don’t cap your traffic or conversions. This makes it a good choice for small businesses, solopreneurs, and cash-strapped startups working to a tighter budget.
All that being said, it’s not a full-stack, all-in-one platform by any measure, and I wouldn’t recommend using it to build your entire website. You’ll need to integrate it with other tools in order to manage your whole online business in our expert opinion.
Is Leadpages for you? There’s only one way to find out and that’s with a Leadpages trial!
Leadpages Frequently Asked Questions
What is Leadpages good for?
Leadpages is good for creating high-converting landing pages, popup forms, and alert bars. It’s not as powerful as some other conversion platforms, but it’s very reasonably priced and a solid choice for SMBs, solopreneurs, and anyone on a budget.
Is it easy to use Leadpages?
Yes, Leadpages is very easy to use. The ready-made templates, simple, uncluttered interface, and intuitive drag-and-drop page builder make it ideal for beginners.
Is Leadpages the same as ClickFunnels?
No, Leadpages and ClickFunnels are two different platforms. While both can be used to create landing pages, ClickFunnels can also be used to build entire sales funnels (read our review here) and comes with many features that Leadpages lacks, including email marketing and automation tools.
What is the difference between Leadpages and ConvertKit?
Leadpages is primarily a landing page builder that only provides you with tools to help you capture leads.
ConvertKit, on the other hand, is an all-in-one creator marketing platform that enables you to sell digital products online and provides you with tools to help you both capture and nurture leads.
Aside from a landing page builder, ConvertKit has several features that Leadpages doesn’t offer, including email marketing and an integrated commerce tool.
ConvertKit also uses a very different pricing model to Leadpages. Leadpages offers two set pricing plans, whereas the price of ConvertKit depends on how many email subscribers you have.
Leadpages Alternatives
If, after reading this review, you’re not convinced Leadpages is the right platform for you, there are plenty of Leadpages alternatives out there you might want to check out instead. We’d recommend:
Unbounce
Unbounce is another leading page builder and conversion optimization platform.
It’s a little pricier than Leadpages but boasts a more flexible and powerful page builder, plus some cutting-edge automation features like Smart Copy (automatically creates on-brand content for you) and Smart Traffic (automatically sends visitors to personalized landing pages).
You can read all about Unbounce in our in-depth Unbounce review. For a 1-to-1 comparison read our Leadpages vs Unbounce comparison.
Instapage
Alternatively, you might want to check out Instapage. This is another powerful conversions platform suitable for both SMBs and enterprises.
Some of its standout features include precise and flexible A/B testing, heat mapping tool (Leadpages doesn’t have this), and AdMap (a tool that enables you to connect ad campaigns to post-click landing pages).
Find out more in our Instapage review.
