Landing page vs microsite
Who owns it after launch
A landing page often lives inside an ad tool or a builder that somebody else controls. When the plan lapses or the agency moves on, the page can quietly lapse along with it.
A microsite usually lives on a domain held in your own account. You hold the DNS — so you can move the whole site to another host whenever you want to.
Ask where a page will live before you commission it, because that answer is hard to change later.
Keep the registrar login in a password manager that more than one person can reach. Losing that account is worse than losing the pages.
What upkeep looks like
A landing page needs almost no upkeep, because it retires on schedule. You save the numbers, write down what you learned, and move on to the next campaign.
A microsite needs a little care every few months. Prices change, staff change, and a page that has gone stale stops being genuinely useful to the person reading it.
Put a recurring reminder in a calendar and the whole job takes minutes rather than an afternoon.
A short checklist covers it: prices, hours, staff names, phone numbers, and any offer that has a date on it.
How you measure each one
The time frame is the real difference between them.
Neither measure is better than the other. They answer different questions, and most businesses want both answers over a year.
- A landing page is judged on one action, over one date range, against one source.
- A microsite is judged over months, page by page and question by question.
- A landing page tells you what a particular ad did while it was running.
- A microsite tells you which questions people arrive with in the first place.
How Microsite Generator handles this
You go live on a free subdomain, or on your own domain with one CNAME record and an SSL certificate issued for you. The domain stays in your name either way.
Page views and conversions are counted on the server, so no scripts and no cookies are added to your site. Sites are capped at up to 25, 50 or 100 pages each, every page passes the compliance gate, and each one is checked against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.
You can also schedule a site to publish at a future date and time in your own time zone. That makes a microsite easy to line up with a launch, without anybody staying late to press a button.
Updated September 2026
Frequently asked questions
Can I turn a landing page into a microsite?
Yes. Keep the offer page and add the pages that answer the questions around it.
Do I need both?
Many businesses run both. The ad points at a landing page, and the microsite catches everyone else.
Which is faster to publish?
A landing page, almost always. It is one page with one job on it.
What happens if I stop paying a vendor?
Your domain stays yours. Ask any vendor what happens to the pages themselves before you sign.
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