---
title: "Mobile Landing Pages – Are You Doing It Wrong?"
date: 2013-09-30
author: "Courtney Robertson"
categories:
  - name: "Mobile Marketing"
    url: "/category/mobile.md"
tags:
  - name: "Facebook"
    url: "/tag/facebook.md"
  - name: "iphone"
    url: "/tag/iphone.md"
  - name: "Landing page"
    url: "/tag/landing-page.md"
  - name: "Mobile Web"
    url: "/tag/mobile-web.md"
  - name: "Responsive web design"
    url: "/tag/responsive-web-design.md"
  - name: "wordpress"
    url: "/tag/wordpress.md"
---

# Mobile Landing Pages – Are You Doing It Wrong?

I was standing in line scanning Facebook on my iPhone. A page that I really enjoy shared a link to an article they just published about the overhaul on making their website mobile responsive. OOOOhhhh shiny! To read said article, I clicked on the link, launching me into the web browser mode of Facebook to read. And just like that, I ended upon a mobile landing page. I couldn’t read anything in the article at all, and instead had essentially a menu consisting of 5 pages, none of which where the blog nor any recent posts. I clicked through from Facebook to read an article on my iPhone… I want the article, not a menu! I find businesses especially eager to “Go Mobile” often forget usability in the process. They pay for whatever makes them now a mobile friendly site, but neglect the fact that it defeats the user experience.

## When should you use a mobile landing page?

Don’t get me wrong, mobile landing pages are highly useful, and I often implement them on websites that I develop. However, they are not synonymous with mobile-responsive websites. Mobile responsive websites mean that as a user, I only have to scroll with my thumb and do not need to pinch and resize the article to a semi-reasonable readable size. Ideally your website should be mobile-responsive (I use [Headway](http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=233381&U=390981&M=27477&urllink= "Headway Theme") for this, which is responsive). If it’s a WordPress website, then the theme should just include mobile-responsive design). If you get some fancy theme that doesn’t include mobile-responsive design and you aren’t ready to overhaul everything, check out [JetPack’s mobile theme feature](http://jetpack.me/ "Jetpack mobile responsive wordpress theme") or [Brave New Code’s WP Touch](http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch/ "WP Touch"). Both of these are plugins that don’t change anything about the theme of your site from a computer but do enable mobile responsiveness on mobile devices. Mobile landing pages are great to use when someone actually types in yourwesite.com or when scanning a qr code. Mobile landing pages should not override your entire website. If I click on your link on Facebook, I should still be able to read the post rather than see a 5 page menu. If I get to your mobile landing page, I still want a link to see the blog and be able to get out of the landing page area to the rest of your site. To build mobile landing pages, check out [MobileChief](http://wordpress.org/plugins/mobilechief-mobile-site-creator/ "MobileChief landing page").