Short answer: you need a website if people will look for you by name or by service. You need a landing page if you are sending traffic from one source to one offer. Most small businesses need the first, and later add the second for campaigns. Whichever you build, the homepage does the heavy lifting, and it works best as eight blocks in a fixed order.
Website or landing page: decide by the job
A website's job is to be found and to answer "who are you, what do you do, can I trust you, how do I contact you". It has several pages because those are several questions.
A landing page's job is to get one visitor from one source to do one thing: book, buy, sign up. Everything that does not serve that one thing is removed, including the navigation.
So the test is: where does the visitor come from? Search and word of mouth want a website. An ad, an email or a LinkedIn post about one offer wants a landing page. One marketing site I built does both jobs on one domain: the Clinical Stack site explains two products, shows demo videos, lists pricing and carries about, contact and privacy pages, and each product section works as a landing target for its own campaign (/work/clinical-stack).
The eight blocks of a homepage that generates leads
In order, top to bottom:
1. One sentence that says who it is for and what it does. Not a slogan. "Staff scheduling for multi-location clinics." A visitor should know in three seconds whether they are in the right place.
2. One action. A single button, with the outcome on it: "Book a 20-minute call", "See pricing", "Tell me what you're building". A second, quieter option is fine; a third is noise.
3. Proof, early. Logos with permission, a number you can defend, a short quote with a name. If you have none yet, show the work: screenshots of the real product. Never invent testimonials.
4. The problem in the customer's words. Two or three short paragraphs describing the situation before you, in the vocabulary they use ("rota" in the UK, "roster" in Australia, "schedule" in the US).
5. How it works. Three or four steps. People buy what they can picture.
6. Who it is for, and who it is not. Naming the three customer types you serve best filters the enquiries you do not want.
7. Answers to the five questions everyone asks. Cost, timeline, what happens after, who owns what, how to start. This block also feeds FAQ markup for search.
8. The action again, with the contact form on the page. Do not send people to another page to fill a form if you can avoid it.
Everything else (team bios, history, blog links) goes below or on other pages.
A SaaS marketing site is a website with a pricing block
If you sell software, add a ninth block between 5 and 6: pricing, or at least the shape of pricing (per user, per location, per month). Hiding prices behind "contact us" on a small product costs more enquiries than it protects. The Clinical Stack site lists both products' plans on the homepage and in a dedicated section, and the signup is one click from either.
Hand-coded or WordPress: an honest answer
WordPress runs a large share of the web (around 43% of all websites in 2026, per W3Techs figures cited by several agencies) and it is a sensible choice when non-technical staff publish content weekly, when a theme and a few plugins cover the needs, and when the budget is small. A well-built WordPress site beats a badly coded custom one every time.
A hand-coded site on Next.js wins when speed matters for search and conversion, when the site must be multilingual with right-to-left support (Reasy's site runs in English, Hebrew and Russian, /work/reasy), when the site shares data with a product (pricing, signup, a customer portal), when you want no plugin maintenance, or when you want to own every line. It costs more to change a page if you cannot code, so pair it with a simple content setup (markdown files or a small CMS) if you will publish often.
If you are not sure, write the one-page brief from post 06 and the answer usually falls out: lots of content changes by staff points to WordPress; integrations, languages and product coupling point to code.
What to measure
One number for the website: enquiries per hundred visitors. One for each landing page: conversions per hundred visitors from its source. A 2026 benchmark reported by an agency citing Unbounce's conversion report puts median landing page conversion at roughly double a general website page (figure not verified against the original report; see sources). Measure your own; the ratio matters more than the benchmark.
Need a site that brings enquiries?
Tell me who should find you, what the one action is, and whether you sell a service or software. I will reply with the block order I would use and whether I would build it in code or recommend WordPress. Form at /contact, or see /services/business-websites.
Sources
- "Website vs Landing Page: What Your Business Actually Needs", mindactive.com, accessed 2026-10-07 (cites Unbounce 2026 Conversion Benchmark Report; not independently verified).
- "Custom Website vs WordPress: What's Best for Your Business?", ambalait.com, accessed 2026-10-07 (W3Techs 2026 share figure).
- "WordPress vs Custom-Coded Websites: Pros and Cons", ambrite.ca, accessed 2026-10-07.