Landing Page vs Homepage: What's the Difference?

A homepage is a general-purpose entry point to a website, built to orient any kind of visitor and offer many paths onward - full navigation, links to every section of the site, and no single required action.

A landing page is built around one specific conversion goal, with everything on the page pointed at that single action - typically stripped of site navigation entirely, so the one link that matters is the call-to-action itself.

That structural difference shows up directly in performance. A homepage's job is to serve broad, non-targeted traffic well, which is why its success is usually measured through engagement metrics like time on page or bounce rate rather than conversions. A landing page exists purely to convert a visitor who already arrived with a specific intent - typically from a specific ad or campaign - and stripping away navigation and competing links measurably improves that: removing the nav menu from a page has been shown to roughly double its conversion rate in documented tests. Sending paid or campaign traffic to a general homepage instead of a dedicated landing page is a common, avoidable mistake, since a homepage's typical conversion rate sits well under a landing page's for the same volume of visitors - the visitor arrives already interested in a specific offer, and a homepage makes them work to find it instead of putting it directly in front of them.