The short version: for most small businesses, the right place to build a landing page is a dedicated tool like Leadpages, Unbounce or Carrd rather than bolting a page onto your main website builder. Pick based on how many pages you need, whether you already pay for a CRM that includes a page builder, and how comfortable you are without a developer. The platform matters far less than the offer sitting on the page, which is the bit nearly every “best landing page builder” article skips.
The quick shortlist before I get into detail
If you want the short answer and want to go build something today, here’s where I’d point a client depending on their situation:
- Total beginner, one page, no budget: Carrd (free tier, or $19/year for the paid version)
- Running paid ads and need to test variants: Unbounce ($99 to $199/month) or Instapage ($199+/month)
- Already on a CRM/email platform: use its built-in page builder, don’t pay twice
- Coach or consultant on a budget: Leadpages ($37 to $74/month) or Systeme.io (free plan available, paid from $27/month)
- Already have a WordPress site: Elementor ($59/year) or a plugin called SeedProd
- Agency or funnel-heavy business: GoHighLevel ($97 to $497/month), which bundles pages, CRM and automation
Dedicated landing page builders, and what they cost
These tools do one job: build a single, focused, high-converting page that isn’t tangled up in your main site’s navigation and menus.
Leadpages is the one I recommend most to solo consultants and coaches. It’s cheap, it has hundreds of templates built for lead capture, and you can have a page live in under an hour. The Standard plan is around $37/month billed annually, and it includes basic A/B testing.
Unbounce is the step up. It’s built for people running paid traffic who need to test five headline variations against each other without touching code. Their AI copy tools have improved a lot, but the price reflects it, starting around $99/month and climbing past $200/month once you need more visitors or conversions tracked.
Instapage sits at the premium end, from around $199/month, and it’s aimed squarely at agencies managing multiple client accounts and dozens of pages at once. Overkill for a one-person business.
Carrd is the tool nobody talks about enough. One page, dead simple, $19 a year for the Pro plan (or free with a Carrd-branded URL). I’ve used it for quick event pages and one-off webinar sign-ups when I didn’t want to touch my main site. It won’t do complex funnels, but for a single clean page it’s the fastest thing I’ve found.
Using your existing website builder instead
If you’re already on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, you don’t automatically need a separate tool.
- WordPress: plugins like Elementor, Divi or SeedProd let you build a landing page outside your normal theme, with no header or footer navigation to distract visitors. Elementor Pro is $59/year for one site.
- Wix and Squarespace: both let you create a page and hide it from your main navigation menu, which is enough for a basic offer page, though the design options are more limited than a dedicated tool.
- Shopify: fine for product-specific landing pages if you’re already paying for it, but clunky for anything that isn’t a product.
The advantage here is you’re not paying for a second subscription. The disadvantage is that most website themes come with distracting navigation menus and footers full of links, and every one of those links is an exit ramp off the page you built to convert someone.
CRM and funnel platforms with page builders built in
This is where I’ve moved most of my own clients over the past couple of years, because paying for three separate tools that each do one job stopped making sense once the all-in-one platforms got good.
HubSpot has a landing page builder inside its Marketing Hub, and if you’re already paying for HubSpot’s CRM (plans start free and scale to hundreds a month), building your page there means your form submissions land directly in your contact records with zero extra setup.
GoHighLevel is the one most agencies I know have switched to. From $97/month you get landing pages, email, SMS, a CRM and pipeline in one place. I’ve watched a client cut three separate subscriptions down to one and save close to $180 a month doing this.
Systeme.io has a usable free plan (up to 2,000 contacts, one funnel) and paid plans from $27/month, which makes it the cheapest all-in-one option I’d point a new business toward.
Kartra and ClickFunnels both do this too, but they’re priced for people already selling something, starting around $99 and $147/month respectively. Not the place to start if you haven’t made a sale yet.
A real example: two landing pages, same offer, wildly different results
A few years back I ran a small experiment for a client selling a coaching programme. We built the exact same offer on two pages: one on their existing Wix site, buried under the main navigation menu with a header, footer, and links to the blog and shop, and one on Leadpages, stripped bare, just the headline, the video, the form.
Same traffic source, same ad spend, same audience. The Wix page converted at 2.1%. The Leadpages version converted at 9.4%. Nothing else changed except the distractions were gone. That gap is the entire argument for using a dedicated landing page tool rather than your main website: not because the builder is smarter, but because it forces you to remove everything that isn’t the offer.
Step by step: building your first landing page this week
- Pick your offer first, tool second. A landing page with no reason for someone to hand over their email won’t convert regardless of platform. If you don’t have one yet, start with a proper lead magnet people want, not a generic “free consultation.”
- Choose based on volume, not features. One page, once: Carrd. Ongoing lead gen with testing: Leadpages or Unbounce. Already have a CRM: use its built-in builder.
- Buy a proper domain or subdomain. A landing page on a free “yoursite.carrd.co” URL looks fine for a personal project but not for a paid offer; point a real subdomain like offer.yourbusiness.com at it instead, which most tools let you do for free once you own the domain.
- Write the headline before anything else. Not the design, the words. What does the visitor get, by when, and why should they believe you.
- Keep the form to three fields maximum. Name, email, and one qualifier if you need it. Every extra field drops conversion, usually by a noticeable amount once you’re past three.
- Add one call to action, repeated, not five different ones. Don’t offer a download, a booking link and a phone number on the same page. Pick one action and make the whole page point at it.
- Send traffic to it deliberately. Pin it to the top of your business Twitter profile, put the link in a QR code for print materials or a stand at an event using a tool that will generate a QR code alongside your digital business card, and drop it into every email signature you own.
The bit that matters more than the platform
Here’s the uncomfortable truth almost nobody selling you a landing page tool wants to say out loud: the builder is not your bottleneck. I’ve seen a page built in twenty minutes on Carrd outconvert a page a developer spent three weeks perfecting in a custom-coded build. The difference was never the tool. It was that the fast page had a sharp, specific offer and the slow one had a beautifully designed vague one.
Businesses spend weeks comparing Unbounce versus Leadpages versus building it themselves in WordPress, and then spend fifteen minutes writing the actual headline. That’s backwards. Spend the fifteen minutes on the tool decision and the weeks on the offer, the headline, and testing what you’re promising.
AI page generators have made this worse in one specific way: they’ll produce a polished-looking page in ninety seconds, and polish gets mistaken for persuasion. I wrote about how fast these tools are moving in a recent roundup of AI tools for small business, and the pattern holds here too, a page can look expensive and still say nothing that makes anyone act.
Mistakes I see constantly
- Building the page on the main website with full navigation intact. Every menu link is a door out of the room before the visitor has heard the offer.
- Paying for Unbounce or Instapage before you have traffic. Their A/B testing tools need real volume to mean anything; under a few hundred visitors a month, you’re paying for a feature you can’t use yet.
- Skipping mobile testing. Well over half of landing page traffic from social and email lands on a phone. A form that’s fine on desktop and painful to fill in with a thumb will quietly kill your conversion rate and you’ll never know why.
- Changing five things at once when a page underperforms. You won’t know which change fixed it, or broke it further.
- Never revisiting the page after launch. A landing page isn’t a one-off task, it’s a living asset that needs the headline or offer refreshed every few months as your business changes.
What I’d do if I were starting today
If you have no existing subscriptions and no page yet, start on Carrd or Systeme.io’s free plan, get one page live this week, and send it fifty visitors before you spend a penny on anything fancier. If it converts at even 15 to 20% on a useful lead magnet, move up to Leadpages once you’re running paid traffic regularly. Only reach for Unbounce or Instapage once you’re testing multiple ad variants at real volume, because until then you’re paying for a feature set you won’t touch.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a separate landing page tool if I already have a website?
Not always. If your website builder lets you hide a page from the main navigation menu and strip out the header and footer, you can build a perfectly good landing page there for free. The moment you’re running paid ads and need to test multiple versions against each other, a dedicated tool like Leadpages or Unbounce earns its cost.
What’s the cheapest way to create a landing page for a business?
Carrd’s free tier or Systeme.io’s free plan, both of which let you build and publish a working page at no cost. You’ll get a branded URL rather than your own domain on the fully free versions, but for testing an offer before you invest further, that’s a fine trade.
Should I use WordPress or a dedicated landing page builder?
Use WordPress with a plugin like Elementor if you already run WordPress and want everything in one place. Use a dedicated builder like Leadpages if you want speed, built-in templates designed specifically for conversion, and don’t want to manage plugin updates and hosting on top of everything else.
How long should it take to build a landing page for my business?
With the offer and copy already written, an afternoon is realistic on any of the tools listed above, most take one to two hours to set up the page itself. The part that takes time, and should, is deciding what you’re offering and writing a headline specific enough that someone stops scrolling.
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