Building an Instagram following is a fantastic way to build your brand and network with potential clients and other small business owners. It’s also a great place to promote your latest blog posts, product launches, and offers – but moving people who are interested from your Instagram profile to your website can be tricky! Instagram only allows ONE link in your profile, so what happens if you have more than one great blog, event, or offer that you want to share with your followers? That’s where custom link pages come in!
What’s a custom link page?
Custom link pages expand the number of links you can share with your Instagram followers by using that one Instagram profile link to send people to a mobile-friendly site with multiple link buttons. Custom link pages are a MUST for Instagram users (like small business owners!) who need more space to share all of their amazing links with followers. Many people just use a third-party app like Linktree or Milkshake to create a custom link page, and that’s a pretty convenient solution to Instagram’s limited link space.
While third-party link apps have the right idea of adding space for more links to your profile, brands can get SO much more out of building a custom link page on a WordPress site! Link page apps act like a go-between to usher people from your Instagram profile to your website. I think it’s better to cut out the middleman and add a custom links page to your WordPress site. It’s a surprisingly simple process that has BIG benefits for your brand consistency, website analytics, and SEO rankings (cue the confetti!)
Why you should have a custom link page for WordPress on your Instagram profile.
When you use a service like Linktree, all of the traffic from your Instagram page has to travel through Linktree’s site to make it to your website. With a custom link page built into your WordPress site, Instagram traffic goes directly to your website – without passing through Linktree first. It actually doesn’t take much time at all to build a custom WordPress link page, and it’s surprisingly easy to do. In fact, I think this is such an essential asset for any brand that I always include custom link pages as a bonus in my custom web design projects!
Benefits of a custom WordPress links page
A custom WordPress links page is a site feature that can grow with your company’s needs, lending consistency to your brand’s online presence, increasing traffic to your website, and resulting in better SEO rankings!
Branding consistency
The most significant benefit of apps like Linktree is making it convenient for Instagram users to add multiple links to their profile, where they could usually only have one. On the flip side, Linktree doesn’t offer the same dependable and consistent brand experience as sending people straight to your own website. It can be frustrating to know you’ve worked SO hard to create on-brand content to lead your potential clients to your latest offer before adding your link to your links page. But when someone clicks on it, it doesn’t look like the rest of the branding that goes with your company. Fortunately, there’s a better way to align a links page with the rest of your branding efforts!
With a custom link page on your WordPress site, you’re in total control of people’s experience with your brand. Linktree gives all of their thousands of users access to the same handful of stock themes, fonts, and color palettes, but a custom WordPress links page can be completely customized to have the same look as all of YOUR brand’s materials. The function of a WordPress links page is basically identical to Linktree, but with the added benefit of your branded fonts, colors, and logos that your clients are used to seeing.
Better analytics data
Not only can a link page for WordPress increase brand consistency, it can also actually drive more traffic to your site! When you build a Linktree for your Instagram profile, people who click on that link visit a mobile-optimized web page on Linktree’s website as their first stop after your Instagram page. That means you have to depend on Linktree’s services to work reliably, which doesn’t always happen! Linktree’s website might crash unexpectedly, or they might mistakenly mark one of your links as spam and make it unclickable, which can be HUGE headaches when it comes to getting traffic to your site.
Hosting a custom link page right on your WordPress site is the most dependable way to ensure that anyone clicking through from Instagram to your links page has a consistent experience as they go from your Instagram to wherever you want them to go! Plus, when all of your custom links page traffic goes through your WordPress site, you’ll also up your analytics game. Since Instagram will be the only app that’s feeding traffic to the links page on your website, you’ll be able to instantly track who’s coming to your site from there – and be able to tell at a glance how it’s performing.
Instead of your Instagram link analytics only being accessible through Linktree, custom WordPress link pages allow ALL of your analytics to be handled by Google Analytics. Within Google Analytics, you can segment out all the traffic that arrives on your page from Instagram and view that activity on your website as one seamless user journey.
SEO Boost
Organic traffic from Google search results is a significant part of how people find your brand! As they search for different topics and keyword phrases, potential clients will visit your site when they discover your content, thanks to Google’s search results. It’s CRUCIAL to show up in those searches as a way to drive more organic traffic to your site – and a custom WordPress links page can give you an SEO boost that Linktree can’t!
Google’s SEO algorithms use a lot of factors to decide how it will rank websites in searches, and one of the factors used to rate the quality and relevance of your website is how much traffic it gets. As I mentioned before, if you use a service like Linktree, all traffic from your Instagram must go through Linktree first before it hits your site. Even if people click through the links on Linktree every single time they follow the link in your bio, Linktree will get half of the traffic from your Instagram links. ALL of that traffic could belong exclusively to your site!
When you make a custom WordPress link page, your page will get all of the traffic directly from Instagram whenever people click on your link page from your profile. And more traffic tells Google that your site should rank higher in search results. Google algorithms can even tell if your site receives a lot of traffic from Instagram via the link in your bio, which will tell the algorithm that your site is relevant. It’s a win-win!
What your custom link page for WordPress should NOT have
Like any landing page, a custom link page in WordPress shouldn’t have a header or footer. Limiting what’s on the page gives a nice and clean visual look that is the best choice for mobile, and it reinforces a solid call to action for people to click through the links you’ve provided. Please resist the urge to add in too many other elements that might distract people or give them so many choices that they click away before visiting one of your links!
The one exception is that I think it’s always best to add your privacy policy, copyright, and terms & conditions as a simple row in place of the footer. Just remember to keep it simple! All you really need for an effective custom link page is a one-page resource to focus on funneling page visitors to whichever links you’ve chosen.
Adding a one-of-a-kind links page to your WordPress site is a super simple process. In just a few extra minutes, you can create a brand-aligned page that will give you better conversions and an SEO boost. To make adding a custom link page to your site even easier, I’ve made a free downloadable Instagram links page template for WordPress to share with you!
Stop losing your valuable website traffic to Linktree and grab your fully customizable WordPress links page template here.
