Leadpages Review: Does It Live Up To The Hype? [2023 Update]

This post was last updated on: 01.Apr

Leadpages' motto is “Turn clicks into customers.” I like that as it’s pretty darn close to our own slogan “Turning clicks into customers since 2004.” After all that’s what we all aim to do - we want our visitors and clicks to turn into long-term paying customers. So, the question becomes:

Can Leadpages help you increase your bottom line? Read our review and find out…

Leadpages Review: What is Leadpages?

Leadpages is essentially a tool that creates landing pages and popups to assist you in collecting leads and creating short, focused, sales pages. Between 2009 and 2015 we did a lot of email marketing through solo ads and leadpages was one of our key tools to efficiently create opt-in pages to collect email addresses. Leadpages has improved quite a lot since then, so let’s look at what you get when you sign up for Leadpages today.

You get templates. And you get a lot of them. To be more specific, Leadpages hands you 200+ professionally designed templates. You can of course choose to start a page from scratch, but why would you? Just pick one of the landing page templates from their massive library, customize it to your liking and start advertising. You get templates in a huge variety of verticals such as:

• Author
• Business and marketing
• Creative services
• Education
• Entertainment
• Travel
• Financial and legal
• Health and wellness
• Home services
• Personal development
• Real estate
• Restaurants
• Software and Technology
• …. And more!

The templates are divided in two main categories: Landing pages and Website templates. Landing pages are short and focused, while website templates give you a few more pages to work with.

Landing page templates, for instance, comes with pre-designed and awesome looking pages for almost any use: 

• Opt-in pages
• Webinar registration pages
• Check-out pages
• About us pages
• Thank-you pages
• Event pages
• Consultation pages
• … And more!

Like I wrote above, if you’re not happy with any of the 200+ free templates you can always design your own using their 130+ drag’n’drop templates. As you would expect from the best website builders today, Leadpages provides a user interface (UI) designed to make creating stunning looking pages a fairly smooth process. Their website builder is maybe a bit less flexible than other builders on the market but for most users that will not pose a problem. 

Leadpages Review: Premium Templates and Marketplace

As a last resort, if none of the 150+ free templates suits your needs and if you don’t wanna design new ones yourself, you can purchase premium templates from web design experts. There’s a marketplace inside Leadpages with hundreds of premium templates to choose from, in addition to many custom leadpages designers selling through their own websites. Leadpages’ does of course create responsive pages that look just as good on a mobile phone as it does on a tablet or a 32-inch widescreen monitor. Finally, Leadpages offers a built in split-testing to help you optimize conversion. 

Leadpages Review: Integrations

Leadpages can boast about a solid number of integrations. The most important integrations for businesses will be Stripe, Paypal and Zapier. The need for Stripe and PayPal are quite obvious: They are the top two methods for digital businesses to accept payments. But why Zapier? Simple. Zapier is a tool designed to connect different apps together in a pretty seamless way. Right now, Zapier integrates with more than 1100 apps. That means that once you are hooked up to Zapier you can integrate with pretty much any app.

If you have no plans of taking payments on your website, you will be glad to know that Leadpages integrate with a solid handful of the most popular apps and tools such as:

• Salesforce
• Shopify
• Twitter
• Aweber
• GetResponse
• Mailchimp
• Hubspot
• Google AdWords
• Google Analytics
• LinkedIn
• Marketo
• Calendly
• Faceook
• WordPress
• … And more!

From the list above, and except Zapier, Paypal, Stripe and the obvious email marketing integrations such as GetResponse and Aweber, my personal favorite integrations are Facebook and WordPress. Totally, Leadpages integrates with over 40 other tools right out of the box. Quite impressive.

Leadpages Review: Instagram & Facebook Ad Integration 

Leadpages and Facebook integrate nicely. One of the key factors to why it works so smooth is the Leadpages’ build in Facebook ad builder. You can set it up to pull content directly from your landing pages to create powerful messages that will resonate with your audience. Another really cool feature of the platform is that Leadpages offers a targeting tool that will help you target the right people for your Instagram- and Facebook ads. That way you won’t waste your advertising budget by showing your ads to the wrong audience. Of course, Facebook also has targeting tools but the tools by Leadpages is an additional benefit to help you target the right audience for your ads. Last but not least, Leadpages offers automated Facebook pixel placements on your sites so you won’t have to struggle with the technical issues of pixel integration on your landing pages.

Leadpages Review: WordPress Integration With Leadpages

Leadpages has a WordPress plugin. So what? You would probably be more surprised if there wasn’t a WordPress plugin. I know I would be far more shocked if no such plugin existed. However, the plugin has some cool features that are worth noticing. 

One excellent feature is that you can create stunning pages and optin forms right from your wordpress dashboard. For instance, you can use the plugin to create popups and show these pop-ups to visitors on your wordpress site. You can for instance use the pop-up to show coupon codes, get opt-ins or even reel in a visitor who is about to leave your site, using the exit-intent feature. Well played Leadpages!

Another nice feature is that if you run an ecommerce site and need to create a check-out page, Leadpages check-out boxes / pop-ups can be added to any landing page. This feature also makes it easy to sell digital products on your blog, as you can easily integrate a smooth shopping experience on almost any wordpress site: Customer click on your purchase link, a check-out box pops-up, customer enter payment details and is taken to your leadpages created thank-you / delivery page. 

Leadpages Review: Sort Templates By Conversion Rate

What’s cool about the free leadpages templates, is that you can sort them according to conversion rate. Leadpages have been around since 2012 and with 43.000+ customers you can be pretty sure that their statistics are significant.  Unfortunately though, they won’t give you the raw conversion facts, time spent on site etc., and you must keep in mind that leadpages users customize their templates so it’s difficult to gauge the importance of these conversion rate statistics. However, you can use them as a guideline for which templates to use.  

Leadpages Premium Templates

With 43.000 users there is a good chance that no matter how well you customize your templates, some of your customers will have seen the layout already. That may lead to lower opt-in rates. 200+ templates is a good starting point, but to be honest you most likely need to get some premium templates. The exception is if you are doing solo ads or other types of grab’n’go marketing. 

*Grab’n’Go Marketing: Hey, I just coined a new phrase. It means those “one field” optin-pages that only have one purpose - To get the visitors email address. The simpler these optin pages look, often the higher conversion rates they will get. For these types of lead-cather pages, the free templates will be useless but you will create a simple opt-in page using the drag’n’drop builder.

Leadpages Most Annoying Feature: Two Editors!

I have no clue what went on in the head of the developers and marketing team at Leadpages when they decided to have two different editors.

The standard editor was the only choice up until 2016. It should have been discontinued and they should have replaced it. Instead, they chose to continue with having both the old and new editor. 

It’s friggin’ frustrating!

The two editors are called (1) Standard and (2) Drag'n'drop. 

The standard editor is used to customize most templates. It’s rather easy to use, but it is very rigid. You can’t move blocks around and you can’t add elements. You can however hide unwanted blocks or elements. 

As a result, using an existing template as a starting point for a full overhaul- or making massive changes to match your brand's look, may be impossible. It just feels very limiting and out of date.

The standard editor can be used to:

• Change text font and edit words
• Change colors
• Change images
• Embed video
• Change the background image
• Include hyperlinks
• A few other minor tasks.

That being said, the drag'n'drop editor is far less rigid, and looks more modern. However, similar to the Getresponse drag'n'drop editor it feels too clunky. It’s 2024 and they should have been able to come up with something easier. 

This is similar to the Getresponse landing page builder. It seems very hard to get right, for some reason. For instance, you must drop the element on the exact spot Leadpages want you to drop it. If you miss the spot, it will be placed somewhere different and the space where you can drop the element is often very small in size making it hard to hit the right spot. The UI just makes it very easy to miss the right spot. Especially, if you are working on a smaller screen lap-top. Sometimes, the size of the elements change depending on where on the page you drop them, and to make things worse element size can’t be changed after it has been placed on the page.

Ok, enough whining. Here’s what you can do with the drag'n'drop editor:

• Anything you can do in the standard editor (So why the heck are there two editors!?) 
• Add widgets such as videos, calendars, headline, image, forms, alert bars etc.
• Move widgets around
• Pretty much everything else you would expect from a modern landing page builder... 

Except:

• Split-testing (See A/B testing section below)
• Resize widgets (Oh, c’mon!)
• Access an image library (Seriously?)
• Upload additional fonts
• Align widgets (Why not?)
• Overlap widgets ( Frustrating)
• Add a parallax background
• Add heading tags like H1, H2, H3. It’s understandable since the main purpose of Leadpages is not to create SEO ready websites, but still...

Leadpages Review: Split Testing

Further up this post, I mentioned that Leadpages offers a A/B split testing function. However, as you can see “Split-testing” is also mentioned in the “exception list” above. 

Confused?

Split testing is a necessity for a conversion focused landing page builder. Their A/B split testing functions let you easily set up pretty straightforward A/B tests. You can compare various landing pages or pop-ups in order to gauge which one is the most “popular.” However, there are some limitations. 

You can’t use the drag'n'drop editor as the split testing function is only available in the standard editor. Also the lowest price option doesn’t even include the split testing function. So, unless you have another way to track conversion rates you are forced to go for the PRO plan. If you already use a link tracker tool like clickmagick you can probably get away with using the Standard option and use Clickmagick to handle the conversion rate optimization. Unless you need the other, more advanced, Leadpages functions that is.

Alert Bars

Leadpages’ Alert Bars is a neat and well working function. It allows you to get a message delivered to users without the intruding full-page pop-ups that users hate. Nowadays, many people use pop-up blockers also, making alert bars way more effective. Alert bars are  mobile-friendly and they provide a simple, yet powerful, solution to increase your CTAs and conversion rates.

Luckily, Leadpages makes these super easy to set up. There is no code to install at all or plugins to deal with. If you pair alert barts with exit-intent pop-ups you can seriously improve your landing page conversion rates and grab leads that would otherwise have left your site without leaving their contact information..

Leadboxes

What are Leadboxes? Basically, they’re optin boxes with a clear CTA. They can be configured in many ways and triggered by the click of a button for instance. Nothing super fancy, but it works well and they are very easy to set up. However, you are limited when it comes to available styling options. 

Leaddigits

I love this one. You’ve probably at some point walked into a store to buy something, and the person behind the counter asked you “Do you want to join our members only club, and get a 10% discount on your order?” You answer yes, and the lady asks you to send “Club” to 4444. You do as instructed, and seconds later your phone goes “pling” and you receive a message asking for your email address. You fill in the details and receive a confirmation message. You show it to the lady behind the counter and she replies “welcome to our club” as she applies your discount.

That’s exactly how Leadpages’ Leaddigits works. Although, you can of course use it however you like, but the example above is one method of using leaddigits. 

Another way to use Leaddigits is to have a text on your website saying “Text Spring2024 to 6666 For a 15% Discount Coupon.” Once someone texts and hopefully fills in their contact details, they are added to your email marketing list. 

It doesn’t get much easier than this.

And it feels waaaaaaay less intrusive than annoying pop-ups. 

Leadlinks

I said that it couldn’t get much easier to collect leads than using Leaddigits, remember? 

Enter Leadlinks!

Leadlinks is a super easy tool to boost your conversion rate. Leadlinks are special links that you add to a broadcast email. For instance, if you are hosting a free webinar and you send out a broadcast to your list advertising the free webinar, all the user has to do is to click the link and they are AUTOMATICALLY signed up to the webinar. That’s a super easy conversion. No further action is necessary on your part. 

Leadpages Review: Pricing

Most marketing tools charge you on a monthly basis and to get the best price you will need to make an annual investment upfront. Leadpages is no different. The pricing starts at $27/mo, but to get the most out of the tool, you probably want to go for the PRO plan which is a monthly investment of $57/mo or only $240 if you pay for one full year. A business that needs the most advanced tools should go for the Advanced plan - Right now it’s less than a thousand dollars per year. Not much for a serious business looking for an all-in-one landing page builder and conversion split-testing tool.

All plans offer a 14-day no questions asked free trial.

This is included in the Standard Plan - $27/mo billed annually

• 1 Site
• Landing Pages, Pop-Ups, Alert Bars
• Unlimited Traffic & Leads
• Free Custom Domain*
• Free Hosting
• Mobile-Responsive Site Templates
• Lead Notifications
• Tech Support
  (via Email)
• 40+ Standard Integrations

This is included in the Pro Plan - $59/mo billed annually

• 3 Sites
• Landing Pages, Pop-Ups, Alert Bars
• Unlimited Traffic & Leads
• Free Custom Domain*
• Free Hosting
• Mobile-Responsive Site Templates
• Lead Notifications
• Tech Support
  (via Chat + Email)
• 40+ Standard Integrations
• Online Sales & Payments
• Unlimited A/B Split Testing
• Email Trigger Links
• 10 Opt-in Text Campaigns

This is included in the Advanced Plan - $239/mo billed annually




• Up to 50 Sites

• Landing Pages, Pop-Ups, Alert Bars

• Unlimited Traffic & Leads

• Free Custom Domain*

• Free Hosting

• Mobile-Responsive Site Templates

• Lead Notifications

• Priority Tech Support
  (via Phone)

• 40+ Standard Integrations

• Online Sales & Payments

• Unlimited A/B Split Testing

• Email Trigger Links

• 10 Opt-in Text Campaigns

• Advanced Integrations

• Includes 5 Pro Sub Accounts

• 50 Extra Opt-In Text Campaigns

• 1-on-1 Quick Start Call

Leadpages Review: Pros and Cons

Let’s wrap up this leadpages review with a walk through of what I consider the most important Pros and Cons after using it for some years and now testing the platform with a 14-day trial…

Pros:

• User-friendly platform. It’s easy to “understand”. Minimal learning curve.
• Relatively low priced compared to some of its competitors.
• 200+ Free templates. Most of the templates look very nice.
• Easy sorting of templates based on type, niche or conversion rate. 
• 40+ Integrations covering the most popular marketing platforms. With Zapier you have almost unrestricted options to connect with any tool or app.

Cons:

• Lacks flexibility. Making significant changes to a template can prove to be difficult. 
• If you have a specific idea on how a landing page should look you may be out of luck due to the lack of flexibility and styling options. However, if you can use the pre-defined templates or are ok with paying for a premium template Leadpages is a good choice.
• Some of the templates are overused (depending on your market). You may have to pay for a premium template to get something truly unique.
• Some annoying bugs such as difficult to drop the sections in the templates to the exact position you want them to be placed.
• You don’t get a lot of bang for your buck on the Standard plan. The Pro & Advanced plans are better options for most.
• User experience. The platform is easy to learn and use, but due to some of the bugs and the fact that they use two different editors, you may end up frustrated from time to time. Tip: Find a good template, learn how to use it and stick with this template. That will help you learn to “operate” that one template without being frustrated with new bugs. It saves you time and frustration.

Leadpages Review: Final Thoughts

43.000+ users rely on Leadpages to design beautiful, fast loading, conversion optimized landing pages. This is a solid product with a long track-record. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet condensed the two editors down to one editor to rule them all, and there are still some annoying bugs to iron out before I can give it a five star rating.

Leadpages is a great tool for start-ups, businesses and online marketers alike and their prices are quite ok. 

I recommend the Pro option unless you need the tools provided with the Advanced option. The Standard option is not really a good option in my opinion.

Take the free 14-day trial and decide for yourself!