There seems to be a perennial debate on the pros and cons of long versus short pages, usually between experts. The short answer (no pun intended) is that you must be testing the landing pages empirically as different markets, visitors and sites are going to have different results. Key considerations when thinking about long vs short pages are:
- Avoid opinion, professional or otherwise, let testing give you the answer
- Have a clearly defined and measurable target for the page, immediate conversion may hamper conversion down the track so keep your eye on the big picture
- If your brand is unknown then one of your challenges is credibility, otherwise the challenge is product/service communication
- Long pages need cues to help people scroll down, this can make or break a long page
- Consider infinite scrolling as a solution, harder to implement but it effectively “right-sizes” the pages to visitor needs
- Don’t sweat what is long and what is short
This post was prompted by a discussion on eConsultancy.
