You bought your domain name, set up a hosting account and installed WordPress. Technically, you have a website... but you don't have any of the actual content ready yet.
Luckily, while you're working on getting that conversion focused website up and running you can already start collecting leads.
Let me show you how to do this with the new Coming Soon landing page sets included in Thrive Architect.
More...
The Coming Soon Landing Page Set
Thrive Architect comes with a library of over 200 landing pages and this includes a brand new set of coming soon pages.
The Coming Soon Landing Page Set Includes 12 Different Designs
Among the Coming Soon Page Sets, you'll find 12 different designs that will allow you to publish a good looking announcement page in seconds.
Crucially, the templates include a lead generation form. That means you can start collecting leads even if your full site isn't ready yet! You'll be able to put your URL on your business cards or on your social media profiles without being ashamed of people arriving on an "under construction" website.
How to Set Up a Coming Soon Homepage
A coming soon landing page is simply a page that replaces your normal homepage until that one is ready to go live.
The coming soon page doesn't have any links on it, so your visitors won't find the parts of your site that are still under construction. This lets you take all the time you need to get your website set up perfectly.
Getting this page up and running on your site is super easy:
1. Download the Thrive Product Manager from your Dashboard.
2. Install & activate it in your WordPress. Check out this article for guidance.
3. Open your Thrive Product Manager, log into your account.
4. Once you've logged in, you'll see the Thrive Products you purchased. Install & activate Thrive Architect within your Product Manager. Check out this article for guidance.
5. Create a new page and call this page Coming Soon, then click on the "Edit with Thrive Architect" button.
6. Click on "Change Template" on the right to select a landing page.
7. Search for the "Coming Soon" page set and pick the design you like.
8. Customize the page and connect the lead generation element with your email service through API.
9. Save the page in Thrive Architect, publish the page from within the WordPress editor.
10. In the WordPress dashboard go to "Settings" > "Reading" and select "Static Page". In the drop down menu, select the page called "Coming Soon".
11. If you don't want your pages to be indexed by search engines while working on your site tick the box "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". Don't forget to change this setting again when your site is ready!
That's it, you now have a coming soon page as your homepage 🙂
Need Help Setting Up Your Complete Website?
Now that you have a coming soon page on your site, it's time to work on that shiny conversion focused website of yours.
If you're not sure where to start, we have a 10-part video course in Thrive University that will guide you from blank WordPress install to complete conversion focused website.
If you haven't already, create your free Thrive University account and start creating your site today:
It's Your Turn to Build a Coming Soon Landing Page
There... Now you have everything to start collecting leads before your website is ready. Don't hesitate select one from the coming soon landing page templates from our template gallery to make sure you have an email list by the time your site is up.
Any questions? Please let me know in the comments below!
These are Fantastic. Keep up the great work. What do you think about a set of pages for Maintenance or site being upgraded and so on?
Hi Greg,
Some of these pages could very easily be adapted for that! Simply change the text a little and you’re good to go
Thanks for the new set of landingpages but frankly I never bother with these since the traffic is so low on a new website I don’t think it’s worth the effort unless it might take you some time to get your site up and running.
Hi Joeri,
It all depends on how long you’re in coming soon mode and where you already advertise your site 🙂
If you can get your website up and running in a few days, a coming soon page is probably not necessary. But if you need weeks and you already want to connect your site to social media profiles or put it on your business cards, having a coming soon page is much better than a half finished website!
Thanks Hanna. Couldn’t agree more.
From my perspective of creating multiple interconnecting sites that are specifically geared to building my audience from locations where they play and socialise rather than where they are buying from, having a coming soon page is essential……and from a newbies perspective takes a little bit of that self imposed ‘pressure to perform’ and therefore more likely to actually move forward and get something up and running.
These coming soon page options allow me to set and forget multiple related ‘none selling’ sites with a coming soon style page on each of them that are collecting valuable email addresses of my target audience for future sales.
If that doesn’t make any sense then let me put it like this:-
If I was selling skiing equipment then I would possibly set up 3 sites that attract skiers but don’t actually sell them anything.
They opt in for the social aspects related to skiing, which they are much more likely to do than if they first see a sales page.
All business owners and marketers should know where their audience plays and what social habits they have. That is where quality audience come from.
These ‘none selling’ sites are then being fed via social media.
In doing this I build a list of highly targeted people, whilst in the meantime also building my main site that does sell ski related equipment to those people at a later date.
You just need to research where your respective audiences are playing and socialising and attract them using none sales methods. Be human. Play. Socialise.
Far too many people jump straight to the sales and wonder why it takes so long to get them. If you already have an audience waiting in the background then sales begin far sooner once your site is launched, which is great for your confidence.
It pays to be patient in the knowledge that the audience is being built and the sales will come rather than being frustrated when you launch to crickets and the sales take forever to materialise.
Do the grunt work for the payoff. It’s much more rewarding and beneficial.
Thanks for sharing Jonah.
Indeed it’s great to have a list of targeted prospects before starting to sell anything!
Thanks Hanne. For me, finding the audience to build a list with isn’t an issue. It’s the technical aspects of setting it up that i struggle with and is why i’m here.
Hi Jonah,
In that case, have a look at theHow to set up a complete list building funnel tutorial 🙂 I’m sure it will help you out!
Jonah,
What a great comment and suggestion. This is the kind of thing that makes so much sense, yet for folks like me it is a “Why didn’t I think of that?!”. Thanks for laying that strategy out so well. 🙂
Hi Suzanne and thank you for your kind words.
So sorry that I missed your comment and therefore haven’t replied to it much sooner.
I often have those slap head moments of “Why didn’t I think of that?!”
But I often also have ideas that I’m not sure will work outside of my own head. They sound great when I think of them and when I write them down in the dead of night but when I wake in the morning they don’t sound that great at all or I talk myself out of implementing them.
Hence searching for something to utilise for rapid implementation.
This ‘none selling’ site ‘strategy’ will work in many markets, particularly those with a large social media following, but may not work for some niche’s or for certain business types whose clients/customers are not very social or who perhaps don’t necessarily have a social connection other than work.
Not sure if a concrete expert will find enough of a social gathering online to make any headway using this strategy, as I don’t recall seeing anyone discussing concrete as they do skis…….if that makes sense.
Horses for courses and I may well be wrong about the social following of concrete.
To add a little more to the ‘none selling sites’ strategy I laid out…….hope this helps…..
…….Rather than using one of the Coming Soon templates that Hanne showcase here, I opted to adapt/edit and use the Thrive Themes One Page Website Template found here –
https://thrivethemes.com/local-businesses-one-page-website
– and adapted it into a ‘Long Form’ Coming Soon page that encourages social following and social sharing, which I believe is extremely important for any new site that is being constructed in the background and that may take a while to go live with.
You can also add an email list building funnel to it.
Very effective at gaining targeted visitors, followers and subscriber well before a site goes live or starts selling anything.
Hope that this helps those members of the Thrive community who also have those “Why didn’t I think of that?!” moments.
Hi Hanne
I couldn’t agree more. I have found that majority of my clients in their excitement to start a new venture already have business cards made up. I have had to use static ‘coming soon’ html pages and then redirect the domain once the site is ready. Your way is so much better! I now don’t need to leave WordPress and can impress clients by creating a coming soon page within minutes. Great stuff (as always).
Happy to hear this will help you Razz!
I can’t remember but does thrive have a coming soon option that enables the coming soon page for viewers and the actual site for logged in users…without installing a 3rd party plugin?
Hi Papis,
No we don’t.
Good work, thank you!
Question: When comes the new Thrive “Theme”?
Best regards,
David
Ditto to David.
Hanne, Shane, Team……I appreciate that you’re busy with the new Theme. Give us a taster…….please.
I think Shane is working on one 😉
Hi Hanne
The new pages are a brilliant development and will be every useful.
Many thanks.
Best wishes
Geoff
Thanks Geoff
Hi Hanne – great work by the team, and clear instructions in the video. Thank you.
Any chance that you & Shane can get together an in-depth post for creating a staging site or ‘sandbox’ which sets out how to move forward *in detail*. The existing information here:
https://thrivethemes.com/tkb_item/how-to-create-a-wordpress-staging-environment/
does not walk us through the process.
I’ve been fiddling with the site live and prefer a more stable solution. It’s possible I’m not the only one doing this. Anybody else editing/building on a live site? Add your comment, please.
Hi David,
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m not sure I would be able to make that tutorial though… I always create sites live 🙂
A great addition. When the site is live, homepage done but we are adding some important internal pages, it looks like these templates would be good to use as well.
In that case I wouldn’t change the wp setting for homepage, but might indicate the page topic on the coming soon pages. Does this seem like a good idea so visitors can see topics or services that will be coming soon?
Then if they are interested we could notify them when those pages are published. We would connect the email service and add a notification email to those tagged as interested, and even those already on our list.
It totally is Al.
We do this with sales pages all the time. It allows to be able to start linking to the page even when the sales page isn’t up and running yet.
The way to do this is to:
1. Create the URL you want (eg. thrivethemes.com/architect)
2. Load a coming soon landing page on this page.
3. Create your “real” page behind the scenes as a draft
4. When you’re ready, change the permalink URL of the coming soon page to something different (eg /coming-soon) and change the permalink of the “real” page to the original URL.
5. Unpublish the coming soon page
Et voilà. That’s how to use the coming soon page as a replacement of an internal page on your site 😀
Thanks, Hanne. These “coming soon” pages come at the perfect time as we are revising a lot of the content on our site as well as adding new pages since we’ve changed directions somewhat.
My partner and I are really loving working with Architect too.
Thanks Al, glad to hear!
Great article, well explained, and an easy to implement solution.
I have a question, can you recommend a thrive theme that would be good to use as a fiction book author?
Thanks.
Hi Steve,
My personal favorite is the Rise theme. It’s clean and versatile. Then you can use one of the new landing pages (like the no photoshop landing page) as your homepage and you’re good to go!
Great timing. I was investigating how to create one yesterday and here it is today!
Perfect timing 🙂 Glad to hear David
Hi,
We when will be released the A/B testing feature?
Look forward to hearing from you,
Carlos
Very, very soon 🙂
Thanks, it’s a wonderful help for me as a beginner of starting my website.
Best regards,
Manfred
Happy to hear Manfred!
Thank you! Very helpful to a Newbie!
Thanks Mary
Hi Hanne,
Somehow, when I choose the coming soon page, nothing happens!
It’s just a default empty page with the sidebar.
I tried to select blank page, landing page from the wp editor, but it is still the same.
Any solution for this, please?
Hi Nenad,
Please follow the instructions in the video 🙂
1. Create a page and save as draft
2. Edit the page with Thrive Architect
3. Go to page setup
4. Pick “Choose landing page template”
5. Now you’ll see the library of templates and you’ll be able to select the coming soon set.
Hi Hanne,
Thanks for the prompt reply!
The problem was with my caching plugin. I did resolve this issue, it was nothing to do with Thrive architect.
All the best to you and to the whole team, which is the best by the way!
Maybe you can create a “SOLD OUT!” page to add to the coming soon templates where once I’ve sold out an event and before I’ve scheduled the next one – I can collect peoples emails who want to know when the next event/webinar/speaking… is being held.
Perhaps just changing the text on one of the templates from “COMING SOON” to “SOLD OUT” or “SOLD OUT – NEXT EVENT COMING SOON” would work…
Hi Frank,
Like Trevor suggests this is really very easy to change 🙂
Uncanny! I decided yesterday to update my site and was looking at the more commonly available ‘Coming Soon’ plugins to use when I just opened Thrive and suddenly spotted these new templates – and then at the end of the same day you send this video, Hanne! Spooky!! But awesome!
Glad to hear this came at the right time Simon 🙂
Can we integrate our (shopify-woocomerce) store with thrive themes?
Hi George, you can use Thrive Architect to build your pages and insert WoorCommerce or Shopify WordPress short codes, but we do not have a deep integration.
beautiful!!! next can you help us with a new plugin to customize our woocommerce checkout pages or even upsell funnels
Might have to ask WooCommerce that Ralph 😉
than Thanks Hanne, great tutorial. Never really thought about collecting leads this way, very interesting. Templates are great : )
Thanks Ramesh
Hello Hanne,
I want say, “thank you and I love the new coming soon templates” and as always, you are correct, they are super easy to set up.
And fantastic job on the video and your English has improved wonderfully. Keep up the good work and know we ( my wife and I) are big fans of your tutorials.
Have a wonderful day and God bless.
Great to hear David
A gift from heaven. Thank you!
Thanks Margherita
Sweet!
Thank you so much. Starting the year like this certainly makes me happy.
Thanks Luis
You guys seem to lead the
WP hit parade every month with great new performances. Nice.
Thanks Lee
Thank you Hanne. These templates are another great addition and a good starting point for me. I’d like to see you expand on these template sets as time goes on if possible.
Without yet having the necessary skills or design flare, I often struggle to see the wood for the trees. I can visualise them but can’t quite put the pieces together yet.
My particular audience is currently growing on social media only but they can be segmented into 4 different categories once I start directing them to my site and ideally I’d want to carry out that segmentation as early as possible in my funnel…….starting at the coming soon page.
My coming soon landing page is going to be the first experience my audience will have of my site, so placing 4 separate opt-in buttons is going to do that segmenting for me. I hope!
Most landing pages are designed with a single visitor in mind, have one call to action or offer and ask that visitor to take just one action with no distractions. This makes perfect sense.
However I am targeting an audience who, although can be grouped as one audience, they in fact have very differing individual requirements:-
As an example:- A football/soccer team has eleven players. Yet they each receive different coaching lessons due to the positions they play in, Goalkeeper – Defender – Midfielder – Striker.
So if I was targeting football players and offering coaching I would need to segment them as soon as possible into 4 different funnels for – Goalkeeper – Defender – Midfielder – Striker.
The current coming soon template set doesn’t really allow for this scenario of early segmentation, or I can’t see how to do that using them, so I have managed to play around with one of the ‘Email Confirmation Templates’ to get it to act as required, ….i.e. I’ve altered the column elements horizontally from 3 to 4, changed the text to suit my requirements and made a few more alterations.
I now have 4 content box areas placed side by side horizontally that are headed – Goalkeeper – Defender – Midfielder – Striker and each with its own button……..The page is thin so no fold to scroll passed.
My visitors are simply asked to select one category that best describes them from – Goalkeeper – Defender – Midfielder – Striker That’s as far as I’ve got but I got there in about 20 minutes, which i am elated about.
My next intention is to either direct each of these to their own specific ‘page’ or through an ’email sequence’ (undecided) that contains further ‘beneficial’ information relevant to them only.
They are then lead to opt-in to my actual offer/service and are subsequently channelled through a funnel that is specific to them.
This seems to be the right way to do this but do I have this process correct?
Is this far-fetched? Is this over the top? Am I over egging this process?
Is it ok to alter a Thrive ‘Email Confirmation Template’ to behave as a ‘coming soon landing page’?
Does anyone else have great ideas but struggle with putting it together? Might be an age related thing.
How would you suggest I could do this better or which combination of page templates should I be using?
Hi Jonah,
Seems like you found a good solution for your problem. You can always use ANY of the templates and adapt them to your needs (we just try to give you specific templates for specific use cases as we did here with the coming soon but you can use any template as a coming soon page).
What you could do when someone clicks on a category is open a lightbox (go to the WP dashboard and to Thrive Lightboxes and create 4 different lightboxes there and then you can trigger them in Thrive Architect with “animations and actions”, trigger lightbox).
This avoids having to create different leadgen pages for each option.
And IMO it only makes sense to do this kind of segmentation if you will DO something with the information (like send them different emails, send them to a different offer,…) if the information is just “nice to have” I would have a general sign-up form (to reduce friction) and segment later through eg email link clicks.
Thanks for the tip. Have a Coming Soon page now. I did not see how to set-up the twitter/FB links…
You can click on the icon and link the icon to your twitter profile or fb page.
Someone told me that any pages built with Thrive wouldn’t be searched for SEO by Google. Is this true? It would make a difference which pages I used Thrive architect on. My tech person installed Thrive on my site and I’m anxious to start using it but can’t afford to miss Google searches as that’s where most of my traffic will come from.
Where did you hear this from? I can’t imagine how someone would justify this statement. My guess is that it must have been someone who has very little understanding of SEO or web technology in general.
Without going overboard with an explanation: Google crawls the code of your website and pages, primarily the HTML content. Regarding the content Google reads to determine the keywords and relevancy of a piece of content, there is no difference between the output of a WordPress page, the output of a page built with Thrive Architect and the output of a page someone codes manually, in HTML and CSS.
If someone tells you something like “this won’t be searched for SEO by Google” please do yourself a favor and ask them to explain exactly what that means and why they believe this to be true.
It’s honestly difficult for me to respond to this. Saying that content made with our products is not indexable by a search engine is an unbelievably naive statement. It’s like someone saying that if you wear a red t-shirt on your commute to work, you’ll get there faster. It seems to indicate a baffling lack of understanding of… well, everything.
So, the short answer is: no, there is absolutely no SEO impact from using Thrive Architect to create your content.
Shane, I admire your patience! 🙂 I’m sure it was either a “competitor” (in which case it’s incredibly stupid of them) or it was one of those “I-Can-Get-You-to-#1-in-Google” self-proclaimed SEO “Gurus!” Some people will employ all sorts of crazy tactics when they perceive their revenue paths are during up! With Yoast’s help and openness about DIY’ing SEO, and your own Thrive articles about SEO, many solopreneurs are taking their own responsibility for SEO… It’s been made accessible to “everyone!”
Thank you, Karen! There’s definitely more misinformation than information about SEO floating around. But it’s been like that since forever, so nothing new there. 🙂
Thank you to all who put my mind at rest. I really like Thrive and wanted to use it for all my posts. It helps to make the readers journey through a post so much more interesting and holds their interest more. I just wanted to check and make sure I wasn’t hurting my SEO chances. Thanks for clearing this up for me. Love, Hugs, and Prayes, NanaPennypockets
Hi Nana.
Shane already gave a thorough explanation to clarify this so I hope it put your mind at ease.
To add my own interpretation…..I may be wrong but perhaps this person has misinterpreted or misunderstood the purpose and very nature of many of these pages.
Many of these pages built using Thrive (or any other competitor page builder) aren’t actually supposed to be indexed or found through Google search. You don’t want them to be indexed.
We don’t want Google to index some of them through SEO but they will be indexed through SEO unless you opt out through using the Yoast SEO plugin or through your WordPress dashboard…..and even that’s not guaranteed 100%.
Hope that makes sense.
Thank so much for this Hanne, it’s really clear and concise. Do you think a Coming Soon page could be used for anything else other than being the front end to the building of, or making changes to, a website? I am thinking you could use it as a page to promote / generate interest in an upcoming event or activity? For example, I am setting up a new Facebook Group soon and have been using other methods to generate interest. Do you think a Coming Soon page would work well for something like this. Your thoughts would be gratefully received.
Sure that’s a great way of using a coming soon page! We often use coming soon pages on sales pages before the product is on sale.
This allows to build a waiting list of eager buyers! (And you can already link to the “sales page” from other parts of your site).
Hanne, Thanks again for a great topic and presentation! Thanks to the Thrive team for offering this way to increase our conversions at the earliest stage possible! 🙂
When I first read your email about this new set of pages, my first thought was to ‘test all 3 Pressive HOME page options against each other’… ???? But, now that I’ve read your article, I realize that’s NOT the way to conduct a proper A/B test! ???? LoL!
And, the dumb thing is… I already KNEW that you only want to test 1 variable… Sometimes it’s hard to apply the things (to your own work) you already know! ????
Anyway…thanks for reiterating the “how” as well as the “why” — useful even for those of us who “know” what we’re supposed to be doing! ????
hahahah so true Karen! We “know” a lot but then when it comes to our own site…
Will I be able to create a “Welcome Mat” and “Smart Bar” (like the Sumo Me plugin) to collect email?
You can do both of those things using the Thrive Leads plugin, yes.
Thank you so much, Hanne!
C’EST GENIAL.
I’ve been lost on the web for… 2 1/2 years, with high level product and skills, tested and approved by customers off-line … but not knowing how to present them on-line !
My website is so bad for my reputation that I’ve been hiding it from my target – market…
A “Coming soon” page is THE solution for me…
Merci infiniment à toute votre équipe !!! 🙂
Avec plaisir!
Please let me add that in order to be lost like that, I paid 2000€ + 3600€ on the French “bloggers’ and marketers'” market.
Which means that in my opinion, you (Thrive Team) have a huge opportunity (if you translate in French your Active Growth posts & podcasts + your Thrive University ones) to become at least an 8-figure business… very easily.
NB : I you need a translator, I can do it… ! 😉
We know that translating could potentially be a good growing opportunity. But it’s not something we’re planning in the near future.
Hi there
I am thinking of switching to Thrive Themes.The thing is that my site has got over 160 posts and many of them link to a landing page that I built using another popular builder.Should I use the ‘coming soon’ template if I want to redirect my traffic ?
Hi Roopesh,
I would create the new landing page first and then redirect from the old URL immediately to the new URL without having to go via a coming soon page.
Hi, the tutorial was great! – I’m a total beginner and it helped me get my ‘coming soon’ page up an running in minutes. I do have a couple of questions though, that I hope you can help me with:
The first is that I am re-branding an old site, so is there a way to ‘turn off’ the old pages so they can’t be seen?
The second is that you recommend checking the ‘discourage search engines from indexing the site’ box – do I need to bother doing this since it’s an old site that is already indexed?
I look forward to hearing from you! Niki
Hi Niki,
If the site’s already indexed it probably won’t make that much difference.
And unfortunately I don’t know of an easy way to “turn off” old pages. If you want to re-do them, you could unpublish them but then you would have to redirect all the pages to your homepage so that when people don’t find the page, they don’t see a 404.
There probably is a free plugin out there to do that.
Hi and thank you for this information. I need to shut up my website for a while, I set up and worked well. This helps me to create impressive coming soon pages in WordPress in an easy way.
Happy to hear Anthony
You Rock Hanne!
Thansk 🙂
Hi, I just built a coming soon page with one of the templates (thanks to the great videos) and realized it is not responsive… can you give me some advice? Thanks in advance!
Hi Elisabeth,
All templates should be responsive. Feel free to ask our support team to check out what happened on your site!