How to Build a Following When Your Website Is Under Construction

These days, there are tools to build a website with just a few clicks. However, creating an effective website is not something you can do in an instant.  

It takes time to come up with a well-thought-out design, seamless user journey, and essential features to ensure a great experience for your visitors. 

But, even while all that is going on, you can still benefit from your website in a lot of ways. 

You can use your “coming soon” page as a valuable asset to help you increase awareness of your brand, generate leads, boost your search engine visibility, receive orders, and much more. 

The 10 strategies listed below can be used to build an audience even while your website is under construction.

1. Create a Creative “Under Construction” Page

The visual elements of your page are important for helping you build an audience while still working on your website. 

You need attractive background imagery and eye-catching color gradients so your coming soon page stands out and draws the focus of your audience to the important message. 

You might even use this page as a way to reflect your brand style and give visitors a sneak peek into what they can expect from the new website design. 

You can add your copyrighted logo, a bit of site info, and other trendy branding elements to the page, but the overall design should be one that stops visitors in their tracks to give you enough time to share your message and compel visitors to take some sort of action, such as signing up to your list, following you on social media, preordering items, etc. 

For this, you can either hire a graphic designer or use a graphic design program to try your hand at a DIY design.

2. Give Visitors a Way to Get in Touch

Your page should provide contact information so your visitors have an easy way to get in touch with you. 

An inactive website does not mean an inactive business, and there’s no need to wait until you launch for you to get valuable feedback from visitors. 

Even while your website is still under construction, it’s still important for you to maintain communication with your audience. So, from the very start, you should encourage them to get in touch with you so they can share their questions, ideas, and concerns. 

Here’s an example from TeekTak of a coming soon page designed to elicit feedback from visitors: 

Make sure your contact information is prominently listed on the page, including an email address, SMS contact forms, or links to social media. 

Whether you are building a new website or if your site is temporarily off-line while undergoing changes, putting these channels in place will help you to maintain trust with visitors and make it easier for you to build an audience for your upcoming website.

3. Offer an Incentive to Generate Leads 

If you’ve been online for any length of time, then you know how important an email list is to the success of your business. 

But, did you know that you can use your coming soon page to build an email list? 

When visitors land on that page, it’s because they are highly interested in what you have to offer. That’s a great opportunity for you to offer them a lead magnet in exchange for their email address or contact info. 

The incentive can be anything, such as:

• A free download
• A coupon code
• Access to early bird pricing (for eCommerce stores)
• A free coaching/consulting session
• The chance to win a contest (for giveaways)

Once you’ve collected their details, you can then reach out to them to start building strong, long-term relationships with a series of emails. 

Why is this important? 

Although there are tons of different promotional channels and advertising methods available these days, email, with 3.9 billion users, is still the most lucrative digital marketing channel. 

With emails, you have the opportunity to approach your customers individually and send personalized messages that are ultimately more meaningful and effective for building an engaged audience.

Here’s an example from Tapster with an offer for visitors to exchange their emails for the chance to win $100.

4. Include a Strong Call to Action (CTA)

You may have a great offer on your coming soon page, but without a strong CTA, visitors might not be compelled to take the desired action. 

Even if you’re not offering a lead magnet on the page, you can simply explain why your site is displaying the “under construction” page and then use your CTA to make sure visitors know what they should do next. That’s basically the purpose of a call to action.

Your coming soon page serves as another important touchpoint for your business, and for it to do so effectively, you need to add one or more calls to action encouraging visitors to sign up, connect, stay involved, or keep the conversation going.

Here are some examples of strong CTAs for different scenarios:

• Sign-up to be the first to know when our website is ready
• Subscribe to our mailing list
• Connect with us on social media 
• Pre-order the latest product  
• Donate to your favorite charity/news site/etc.
• Download a free guide

Choose the relevant call to action depending on the goals of your “website under construction” page.  In most cases, the best action you can have people take is to sign up to your email list so you can use your preferred email tool to communicate with them early and often about what your company is up to.

This example from Flowdock has a relevant CTA to elicit the required action from visitors:

5. Create Hype and Brand Awareness

In the real world, stores, cafes, and clubs often have some type of previous promotion before they open. Pre-opening marketing is also important online, and it can be just as impactful as your ad strategies after launching your website. 

You need to create hype for your website, particularly if you are promoting products or services. For instance, say you’re launching a disruptive service like a Kickstarter campaign or an innovative app, you could use your coming soon page as an eye-catching virtual version of a physical shop window that screams “Get ready. We’re opening soon!” 

If you’re looking for an easy way to take care of both the graphic design and functionality related to an under construction page, consider trying a website builder as they have all of this by default. 

When done right, this page will help you get your future customers interested and excited so they’re eager to visit your site when it does finally launch. 

6. Boost Your Search Engine Visibility

The more visible you are online, the easier it will be for you to build an audience. And, even when your website is under construction, it’s still possible for you to score points with Google. 

You can SEO-optimize your coming soon page well enough for the search giant to index it and show your content in the search results. 

If you are building a brand new site, you don’t have to worry about your rankings dropping because of website changes, but if your existing website is offline for any period of time, your SEO may be impacted. 

You can minimize the negative effects on your search engine optimization by writing useful information and including relevant keywords to not only impress your audience but also search engines, too.

Here’s an example of this concept in action from The Astonishing Post:

Coming soon/maintenance-mode plugins and themes have technical and design setups that allow you to set up your website for search engine optimization success. 

Most of them come with access to a simple and intuitive interface for SEO which comes with guidelines, checklists, and built-in testing tools to help you supercharge your optimization efforts. 

This can be extremely helpful if you plan on a longer development process or if you have moved your launch date further into the future. And the best part is that you can still use these tricks to promote your site and attract organic traffic even with a low budget.

7. Use Your Coming Soon Page for Pre-sale Opportunities 

A coming soon web page is a great marketing tool for attracting interest for upcoming apps or products. You can use the page in conjunction with online marketing campaigns, ads, or marketing events, etc..

Also, if you’re getting a lot of traffic through marketing channels like SEO or social media, it’s important to make sure you don’t miss out on all the potential customers, and you can do so by creating an effective presale coming soon page. 

Your coming soon page will serve as a space for a pre-launch campaign so you can pre-sell your product before you start making it available on your new website. 

So, instead of a boring static page, you might set up a presale and include an enticing countdown to encourage visitors to take action. You could offer some of your flagship products or services at a reduced price for those people who’ve already found their way to your site and take their orders right on that page. 

In addition to making a pre-launch direct sale, you’ll also have another email of a recent customer to add to your subscriber list.

8. Test Website or Product Ideas Quickly

Another way to use your coming soon page to help you build an audience online is by using it as a way to test websites or product ideas quickly. This way, you’ll be sure that you are creating something people actually want, and not what you think they want. 

In the end, this will make a huge difference in your website’s success.

Simply send traffic to the page and see how people react to your design, offer, CTA, etc. This is particularly helpful for anyone who isn’t 100% sure which direction to take their website. Or, if you have many different website design ideas, and want to know which one is the best, you can use your coming soon page as a way to test each version and get fast real-world feedback. 

This way, your audience knows you’re working to provide them with the absolute best product or experience possible and it instills a sense of trust in your brand, which makes it a lot more likely that your visitors will stick around after you launch your website.

9. Promote Your Social Media Pages

A “website under construction” page is a great marketing tool and when used for social media promotion, it can help you reach even more people to let them know about your new website. 

You can redirect your visitors from the page to your profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. where your visitors can learn more about your business and brand. 

You can also showcase some of your products and services so that after you launch your website, customers can easily recognize your brand. 

This strategy is simple to implement. Just add links to your social accounts on your coming soon page with a strong call to action for visitors to connect with you on various social media networks.

Here’s an example of a website under construction page from The Public Forum with links to the forum’s social media profiles:

10. Use Countdowns to Keep Users Engaged

Visitors love to see progress. It keeps them engaged and interested in your upcoming website launch. You can display this as a counter of the days remaining before you launch the full version of your website. 

Alternatively, you can use a progress bar to show the readiness of the website. 

Either way, use this tactic to instill excitement in your visitors. Just make sure you’re close to completion, otherwise, a countdown timer with months on it, or a progress bar that is closer to 0% than 100% is likely to scare visitors away.

Here is a great example of a countdown timer in use on a coming soon page from Leap which shows visitors that the brand is serious about the launch:

Conclusion

This article has outlined the best coming soon/website under construction page examples from across the web. 

Use them as inspiration to help you build a following while your website is under construction by generating buzz, collecting customer data and leads, increasing social media followers, and even receiving orders. 

By the time your website launches, you will have an audience eager to explore your new site.

Which of the items listed above do you think will have the largest impact on your ability to build an audience with your “coming soon” page? Share your thoughts in the comments below!