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How To Setup An Opt-In Form Homepage In WordPress Without Changing Your Theme

You might think that your homepage is the least likely place to convert website visitors into email subscribers.

After all, most of the time your landing pages are created specifically for a certain promotion, your services or work with me page.

Perhaps you’ve added an opt-in for to your homepage just because, but be honest: how much thought have you put into that opt-in form?

In fact, how much traffic are you getting to your homepage?

The truth of the matter is, your homepage can go from boring to fabulous, and add quite a few subscribers to your email list if you set it up properly.

Some WordPress themes like Digital Pro from StudioPress come with a homepage that’s designed to convert your visitors to email subscribers.

Some of the themes allow you to create custom layouts with a help of a built-in visual editor.

But consider for a moment what happens when you decide to switch themes? That carefully crafted homepage will go away with your old theme, and unless you’re a skilled coder or unless you find a theme with the same functionality, your homepage will drastically change.

That’s why it’s useful to use a plugin instead.

Today, we’ll take Thrive Landing Pages for a spin and see how this plugin can help you create an amazing opt-in form homepage. In the process, you’ll be able to maximize your conversions so you can build your email list faster.

What you will learn in this tutorial

  • How to build an opt-in form homepage using Thrive Landing Pages
  • Benefits of using Thrive Landing Pages

Tutorial information

Difficulty: Beginner / Intermediate

Time Required: 1 hour +

Content Management System: WordPress (self-hosted)

Summary of steps:

  • Step 1 – Install and activate Thrive Landing Pages
  • Step 2 – Select your opt-in form homepage template
  • Step 3 – Customize your template
  • Step 4 – Repeat if necessary

What is Thrive Landing Pages?

Thrive Landing Pages is a part of a premium WordPress plugin that gives you access to three plugins for the price of one: Thrive Landing Pages, Thrive Content Builder, and Thrive LightBoxes.

Thanks to this plugin, you can create eye-catching landing page layouts, and use content builder anywhere in your posts and pages without knowing any code or changing your theme.

The plugin comes with more than 156 templates to choose from and they are all grouped in different sets – depending on the type of landing page you want to build.

More importantly, the interface is intuitive and easy to use – a true WYISYG style editor that lets you see how your pages will look as you are creating them.

Let’s see just how easy it is to use Thrive Landing Pages.

Get Thrive Landing Pages

Using Thrive Visual Editor to create an opt-in form homepage

Step 1 – Install and activate the plugin

To begin with, you need to install and activate your license with Thrive Landing Pages before you can use it. Head to Plugins on your WordPress dashboard, Add New and Upload the plugin.

add new plugin

Step 2 – Select your opt-in form homepage template

Now you’ve installed and activated Thrive Landing Pages, head over to Pages on your WordPress dashboard and Add New.

Name your new page and click Save Draft. Once saved, you can now edit it with Thrive Content Builder.

Launching Thrive Content Builder

A new tab will open, with your page in visual editor mode with a sidebar and customization options.

The next step is to select an opt-in form template; this is achieved by clicking Thrive Landing Page in the right sidebar and selecting Choose Landing Page.

Landing Page Templates

As you can see, there are plenty of templates to choose from. For the purposes of this article, I’ve chosen the Offer Focused template, but you’re free to choose whichever template you like.

Step 3 – Customize your template

If you look at the sidebar, there’s a wide variety of elements you can add to your page: from simple text elements, images, buttons to testimonials, pricing tables, quotes, social shares, and more.

Customizing the chosen template is dead simple. Hovering over any element on the page, you can completely customize any aspect of it.

You can change background colors, font colors and sizes, import your own custom fonts, add icons to your page and much more.

Styling The Homepage

You can also easily re-order the elements by dragging and dropping them from one location to another.

In our example, I’ve changed the logo and removed the header menu that was present in the original template.

I’ve changed the colors to match my own as well as replaced the text with my own copy.

After the first opt-in form, I’ve added a mock-up sampling of what someone would get if they join my email list.

Next, I’ve included a couple of example testimonials which could be used to give your incentive social proof.

Finally, the opt-in form was repeated once more and the design was finished off with a button that takes the visitors to the blog.

Opt-In Form Homepage

Step 4 – Repeat if necessary

It’s worth mentioning that you can create a completely custom homepage from scratch by selecting the blank page template.

You can then save that page as a template to re-use it as often as you’d like.

To do so simply follow the steps below:

  1. Create a new WordPress page, name it, save or publish it and then load an existing landing page from the “Default Landing Page” tab in the template library.
  2. Customize the loaded page content to fit your needs. Make all the necessary changes such as the text, the colors, margins, paddings, images, and click Save Changes.
  3. To save your landing page as a template, expand the Thrive Landing Pages drop- down menu, and select Choose landing page, then enter a meaningful name in the window on the left. Finally, click on Save Landing Page.

Your saved template will now appear in the Custom Landing Pages tab and can be used over and over again.

Using custom landing page templates is easy and you can load a template over the page you want to edit.

To load a landing page template, follow these steps:

  1. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Pages and select the Edit with Thrive Content Builder option for the page you want to edit.
  2. Expand the Thrive Landing Pages drop- down menu, and select Choose landing page.
  3. Click the Custom Landing Pages tab, select your preferred template and click the Load Landing Page button.

Your saved template will overwrite the page you are currently editing and from here you can go through the steps to edit and modify the contents and the design.

Benefits of using Thrive Landing Pages

Using a visual editor like Thrive Landing Pages plugin has several benefits.

You’re not locked into your theme

As mentioned before, some themes come with visual editor built-in. Although the idea is nice, when you decide to switch themes you either have to look for a theme that has the exact layout you want (which is hard to find when you’re buying pre-made themes) or you have to pay someone to design the site exactly the way you want it.

Once that functionality is moved to plugin territory, you’re free to change themes as often as you’d like and all your pages created with Thrive Leads will stay with you.

Timesaver

Even if you know your way around code and don’t mind coding a super-custom homepage to boost your conversion rate, doing so takes time. Time that can be spent on marketing efforts or actual (client) work.

Thrive Landing Pages allows anyone to quickly create a highly-converting page even if the only thing they change is the text that comes included with the template.

Using Thrive Landing Pages is more cost effective

Hiring a designer or a developer to create a custom website, or even just one page can get expensive, especially if you’d like to create more than one custom page.

Considering the basic license for Thrive Landing Pages will set you back as one premium theme, you can clearly see the benefits of using the plugin. Especially if you take into consideration that there are no limits to the number of pages you can create.

Three plugins for the cost of one

I’ve mentioned earlier that you get three plugins for the cost of one. Thrive Content Builder makes it possible to create custom layouts for your blog posts, following the same logic as Landing Pages. The customization is just as easy. Thrive LightBoxes on the other hand will display a pop-up form on your site.

All three components combined give you access to tools that will transform your website into a powerful marketing machine and skyrocket the number of your subscribers.

Final thoughts

Growing your email list is paramount to the success of your blog and your business. To make the most out of your website, your pages should be designed in such a manner that they give you the maximum conversion rate possible.

Using Thrive Landing Pages allows you to convert any page on your website into a highly-converting and eye-catching page.

The only feature that’s missing and that would make this plugin even better is the ability to split-test variations of your pages in order to get the best possible results.

However, even without that feature, Thrive Landing Pages is a worthy investment for your blog.

Get Thrive Landing Pages

 

This article was first published here

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