Landing page or website? Brochure site, microsite, long or short page, template or custom

This guide brings together our articles on choosing a page format (previously one per question). Each section gives the decision criteria and the cases where each option wins.

For the cost of each option, see how much a landing page costs.

Can you launch a landing page without a website? Yes — and it's often the best starting point

"We need to build our website first": how many launches have been waiting for months behind that sentence? The reality is simpler — a standalone landing page, on its own domain name, is a perfectly legitimate starting point. You just need to know what's genuinely essential, what can wait, and what a single page won't be able to do.

What's genuinely essential

• A domain name of your own: the only non-negotiable investment (around ten euros a year). An address on a third-party tool's subdomain says "temporary" to every visitor, weakens ad delivery and locks you into the provider. The domain follows you when the page becomes a site.
• Hosting — free or nearly free today: a modern static page deploys on Vercel, Netlify or equivalent with no server to manage and no mandatory subscription at the start. The full technical question is covered in our comparison Next.js or WordPress — for a standalone page, the static option wins almost every time.
• A professional email address on the domain: contact@yourdomain.com reassures as much as the page itself; a form that replies from a free consumer address undoes what the design built.
• Legal notices, even for a single page: in France, any professional site — even a one-pager — must identify its publisher and host, and collecting emails triggers the obligations described in our guide to the GDPR-compliant form. A discreet footer link is enough; its absence is both a legal risk and a distrust signal.

The classic objection — "a single page doesn't look serious" — rests on a false intuition about what builds credibility online. The large study by Fogg and colleagues at Stanford's persuasion lab, published in 2003 (see the study), analysed the comments of more than 2,500 participants assessing the credibility of real websites: the most cited criterion, far ahead of all others, is the appearance and professionalism of the design — layout, typography, consistency — well before the site's size or the quantity of content. In other words: one polished page is more credible than ten sloppy ones. Visitors don't count your pages; they judge the one they see — its design, its clarity, its social proof, the presence of a real face and real contact details, as our article on the founder's photo details.

Landing page or full website: which one to launch your offer?

Removing the navigation menu from a landing page can double its conversion rate — the tests are unanimous on that one point. Here's how to decide between a landing page and a full website without picking the wrong tool, and the combo that works for most independents.

Before comparing the two formats, run a simple test: list the active offers you want a visitor to click on today. One single offer, one audience, one goal — a discovery call, a pre-registration, a purchase — and the landing page wins almost every time, whatever your industry. Two offers or more, with different audiences (consumers and businesses, several cities, several price tiers), and a website with multiple pages becomes necessary, if only to avoid mixing messages. The confusion mostly comes from the fact that you can do both at once — it's actually the winning combo, more on that below.

The 5-question decision grid

• One offer or several? One active offer → landing page. Several services with different audiences → website with multiple pages.
• Where does the traffic come from? Ads, email, bio link, time-limited campaign → landing page. Branded search, word of mouth, referrals → full website.
• Is there a deadline? Launch, pre-registration, webinar on a fixed date → landing page, fast to publish and adjust.
• Do you have content that lives over time? Blog, portfolio, regular news → requires pages a single landing page can't contain.
• What's your budget and timeline? A few days and a tight budget → landing page. Several weeks and a v1 built to last → full website.

Landing page on a small budget: the serious options under €500

Between €0 and €500 you'll find everything: free builders that put their logo on your page, premium templates you can deploy in an evening, junior freelancers, and AI-generated pages. What each tier actually buys.

Carrd, Systeme.io's free plan, MailerLite, and others let you publish a page without spending a euro. To validate an idea within a week, it's unbeatable. The limitations are well known and we detail them in our article on free tools and their limits: the tool's subdomain (yourpage.carrd.co), the platform's logo on your page, capped features (forms, tracking, A/B testing), and a painful migration the day the business takes off. That's the real cost of free: everything you build — URL, SEO history, data — belongs to a third party's free plan.

Summary table

Microsite or landing page: which structure fits your campaign

A microsite sounds reassuring on paper — more pages, more content, more serious than a single landing page. But every page you add is one more path where a visitor can wander off before converting. Here's how to decide based on what the campaign actually needs to achieve.

A microsite is a small, self-contained site separate from the main one, usually built for a campaign, an event, a sub-brand, or a specific product line. It has several pages tied together by its own navigation: a home page, an overview, offers or speakers, sometimes a dedicated blog, a contact form separate from the main site's. It often lives on its own subdomain or domain, with a visual identity that can diverge from the parent brand. It's a full site, just smaller in scope — not a single page.

Microsite and landing page, side by side

Landing page, destination page, lander, squeeze page: which term to use

A client asks for a squeeze page, the agency delivers a landing page, and the Google Ads interface reports on a destination page. Three words for roughly the same object: the confusion wastes time in meetings, and traffic in search.

Where the terms come from

The vocabulary problem has been documented in human-computer interaction for decades. A study by Furnas, Landauer, Gomez and Dumais published in 1987 in Communications of the ACM shows that when people are asked to spontaneously name the same object or the same action, the variability of the words they pick is very large: in every domain tested, two people chose the same term with a probability below 0.20 (Furnas, Landauer, Gomez & Dumais, 1987, Communications of the ACM). The authors conclude that a system recognizing only one "preferred" word fails in a large share of cases, and recommend accepting a wide range of synonyms — what they call unlimited aliasing. The parallel with search is direct: a page that uses a single label mechanically cuts itself off from the phrasings most people actually type.

Long or short landing page: how to choose the right length?

A page that fits on one screen and a page that scrolls through ten sections can both convert extremely well — for different offers. The right length isn't a matter of taste; it follows from how much commitment your offer demands before someone buys.

Contradictory case studies circulate constantly in the industry: some short pages beat long variants, other long pages double the conversion rate of a short version of the same offer. Both results are accurate, and that's exactly what proves there's no universal rule: what varies from case to case isn't the "right" number of sections — it's the product being sold. A page collecting an email in exchange for a free guide and a page selling a €2,000 coaching program don't require the same amount of persuasion work, and therefore not the same length.

How to decide for your own page

1. Assess the commitment you're asking for: free and one click (short page) or paid and considered (long page)?
2. List the real objections your prospects have (price, method, results, availability) — every uncovered objection justifies one section, no more.
3. Check how familiar visitors already are with your offer: someone who already knows you (retargeting, referral) needs less context than a stranger arriving from a Google search.
4. Keep the price visible early, even on a long page — scrolling through ten sections before discovering a deal-breaking price is the worst kind of surprise; our article on the price anchoring effect explains why showing it early helps rather than hurts.
5. Test it, don't guess: on a high-traffic offer, a short version and a long version can be compared directly. Our guide on A/B testing a landing page covers how to do it properly, with a large enough sample before drawing conclusions.

Landing page: template or custom-built? Price, timelines and quality compared

Between a template under €100 and a custom build billed at €3,000 or more, the price gap is wide enough that the question deserves better than a one-line answer. An honest comparison of both approaches — cost, timeline, quality, flexibility — and the situations where each is objectively the right choice.

The comparison in one table

On perceived quality, research offers a useful benchmark: a 2006 study by Gitte Lindgaard and her co-authors, published in Behaviour & Information Technology, shows that visitors form a stable aesthetic judgment of a web page in about 50 milliseconds — a judgment that then colors their perception of everything else. What that implies for our question: what matters is that the page immediately looks polished and professional, not that it looks unprecedented. A good recent template clears that bar; a dated or poorly executed custom build doesn't, whatever it cost. Along the same lines, a 2003 study by B.J. Fogg and his Stanford team, based on over 2,600 site evaluations, found that the first criterion users cite when judging a site's credibility is its appearance and design — far ahead of the company's identity. Credibility is decided on visible execution, which both approaches can deliver.

If the answer is "a landing page, fast, with the code in hand", that is exactly what LanderKit templates sell (€89, or €229 for the pack).