How to create a landing page on Shopify

Shopify doesn't have a landing page builder in the way marketing platforms do. What it has instead is alternate page templates built from sections — which is more capable, faster, and free, and which most stores never discover.

The right way: an alternate page template

1. In your theme, create templates/page.landing.json alongside page.json.
2. Add the sections you want a campaign page to use.
3. In the admin, create a page and assign it the landing template.

Now every campaign page created with that template gets the same structure, and a marketer can add pages without a developer. Add more templates as you need them — page.launch.json, page.guide.json.

This is the same mechanism behind product and collection variations, covered in JSON templates.

What a campaign landing page actually needs

Different from a normal page, because the visitor arrived from an ad with a specific expectation:

• A headline that matches the ad. The single biggest cause of a high bounce rate on paid traffic is a page that doesn't say what the ad said.
• One action. Not a menu, a newsletter signup, a chat widget and three collection links. One.
• The product or offer above the fold, on a phone.
• Proof close to the action — reviews, numbers, a guarantee.
• Reduced navigation. Many landing pages deliberately hide the main menu so the only way forward is the action.
• No popup. You paid for this visitor; don't interrupt them.

Hiding the header on a landing template

If you want a stripped-back page, the clean way is a section group or a conditional in theme.liquid keyed on the template:

``liquid {% unless request.page_type == 'page' and page.template_suffix == 'landing' %} {% sections 'header-group' %} {% endunless %} ``

Better still, build a header-minimal section and include it on the landing template so the page still has branding and a way back.

Page builder apps

There are several, and they're genuinely useful for teams with no developer — drag-and-drop, no theme edits, marketers can ship pages alone.

The trade-offs are real and worth stating:

• They add weight. Their own JavaScript and CSS load on the pages they build, and sometimes site-wide. On paid traffic, where every visitor costs money, that's a direct conversion cost — the performance checklist.
• Their pages are theirs. Uninstall the app and the pages typically break. That's real lock-in on assets you're spending ad budget driving traffic to.
• The output rarely matches the theme exactly, so campaign pages look subtly off-brand.

If speed matters and you have a developer, alternate templates are faster and you own the result. If you have no developer and need pages weekly, an app is a reasonable trade — just know what you're accepting.

Keeping landing pages fast

Landing pages carry paid traffic, so they're the pages where speed is most expensive to get wrong:

• One hero image, sized properly, not lazy-loaded (it's your LCP element).
• No carousel.
• No video autoplay above the fold.
• Defer everything not needed for first paint.
• Measure the page on a throttled mobile profile before you spend money sending traffic to it.

Measuring them

Give each landing page a purpose and one number: conversion rate for that page, from that campaign. Shopify's analytics will show landing-page performance; the useful comparison is against your standard product page, not against your other landing pages.

If a landing page doesn't beat the product page it's replacing, delete it. That happens more often than agencies admit.

The simplest version

For a lot of stores the best landing page is a collection page with a written description and a curated product set, plus an alternate collection template with a proper hero. No new page, no app, and it benefits from filtering and search — collection pages.

Try that before building anything.

Shopify's landing page tool is the theme. An alternate template plus sections gets you a page that loads in under two seconds and doesn't disappear when a subscription lapses.