What is an entry page?
An entry page is wherever a session begins. Analytics tools record the first pageview of every visit, and the pages that most often come first are your entry pages. Google Analytics calls the same thing a landing page in its reports, which causes confusion with the marketing meaning of landing page (a page built for a campaign); an entry page is any page, planned or not, that happens to be the door someone walked through.
On most sites the homepage is one entry page among many. A blog post that ranks, a case study someone shared, a film page linked from a newsletter: each is a front door to a visitor who has not seen anything else you made.
Why it matters
Why an entry page matters
It matters because the visitor on an entry page has no context. They did not pass the homepage, read the about page or see the navigation. They arrived from a search or a link with one question, and the entry page has to answer it, introduce the brand and offer a next step, all without assuming anything. Pages designed as interior pages, that lean on what came before, fail this test.
It also matters as a map of demand. The entry page report tells you which pages are actually pulling people in, and from where. Often the answer is surprising: a three-year-old article outdrawing the homepage, a glossary term outranking the service page it should feed. That is where the opportunity, and the risk, is concentrated.
In practice
How an entry page works in practice
- 01
Pull the landing page report in Google Analytics, split by channel, and sort by sessions. For each page near the top, ask what someone arriving cold would need: a headline that confirms they are in the right place, an answer to the query that brought them, a visible sense of who you are, and one clear next step. Compare engagement rate and conversions across entry pages: a high-traffic entry page with low engagement is the biggest lever on the site.
- 02
Then treat every page as a potential entry page, because it is. Put the brand where it is seen without scrolling, make the navigation self-explanatory, keep the contact route one click away, and give deep pages related content so a visitor who arrived for one thing finds the rest. Search sends people to the page that matches the query, not to the page you would have chosen for them.
Watch out
What people get wrong about entry pages
Designing as if the homepage is the entrance. Teams polish the homepage for months while the pages that actually receive first visits are left untouched, with no introduction and no path onward. The second mistake is the name: confusing analytics landing pages with campaign landing pages and optimizing the wrong report. The third is ignoring the channel split. An entry page that performs for organic search can fail for paid social, because the visitor arrived with a different expectation.
