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The Ultimate Guide to Creating Gated Content Landing Pages in 2025
Create Engaging Gated Landing Pages With These Top Tips
Nicola Vaughan
January 26th, 2025
Ultimate Guide to Gated Content Landing Page Examples
If you’re exploring lead generation and how to improve it for your brand, you may have encountered the term ‘gated content’ in your searches.
With gated content providing conversion rates of up to 45% (Monster Insights), it’s no wonder this technique is becoming more popular with online marketers.
Are you confused about what gated content is and how to use it to create great landing pages designed specifically to convert?
If your answer is yes, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we’ll help you better understand what gated content is and its importance in digital marketing, teach you how to balance content accessibility and exclusivity, give you some examples of great performing gated content, and explain how to build and measure gated content landing pages.
Table of Contents
Understanding Gated Content and Its Importance
So what is gated content?
Gated content is online content that is hidden behind a data capture form, exclusive only to users that enter their information -- typically a name and email address.
While it may seem counterintuitive to conceal content from your audience, gated content is designed to provide exclusive content to those who are interested enough to provide their contact information.
This makes it highly effective in improving lead generation, capturing data from users who are highly interested in what your brand is offering.
Maximizing Lead Quality With Gated Content
Gated content is a useful technique for maximizing the quality of your lead generation. You may be receiving a fair number of leads into your business, but perhaps you’re finding that these leads have a low conversion rate.
One benefit of gated content is that users will only leave their information if they’re genuinely interested in the resources you’re offering.
Over time, you’ll build a list of email addresses from highly interested users so that you can then send future content with the knowledge that you’ll likely achieve a higher conversion rate.
This can help to maximize your lead quality for your business overall, focusing more on users who are more likely to convert and filtering out the users who won’t.
Identifying the Best Gated Content for Your Audience
Before jumping straight into a gated content strategy, it’s important to identify the best types of gated content examples for your audience.
This will largely depend on how your business works and what type of service you offer, but it usually takes the form of the following content types:
Ebooks
Whitepapers
Webinars
It’s key to identify your audience preferences and understand what they expect and desire from your brand so that you can best meet those needs with your gated content.
For example, if you run a business selling an online tool, your audience may be interested in a webinar to receive interactive walk-throughs of your product and an opportunity to ask any questions they may have.
Ultimately, you need to think about what you can offer as a business that your audience will want to see and be so interested in that they’ll provide their contact details in return.
Balancing Content Accessibility and Exclusivity
So how do you determine what is gated and what isn’t in terms of your website content?
Essentially, you need to decide what content is the most valuable and more difficult to find elsewhere -- this would make up your gated content.
Anything else should be left ungated, providing users with a taste of your content and a basis for what more they can expect if they decide to engage with your exclusive content.
If you gate everything, your audience may feel short-changed and will be less likely to interact with content hidden by data capture.
On the flip side, if you don’t make any content exclusive, you’ll miss out on a key strategy for data capture. Plus, you won’t know who in your audience is more interested in your content.
For more tips on email content strategy, check out this useful blog post!
Examples of High-Performing Gated Content
Some brands have better-gated content landing pages than others.
Here are some of our favorite real-world, gated content landing page examples to give you some inspiration with your own gated content.
Human Made – How To Gate Keep Whitepapers
Digital agency Human Made has a great landing page for their Whitepaper gated content.
This page has a clear headline highlighting the benefit that the whitepaper can provide for the reader, positioned alongside a visual of a tablet with a sneak peek at the information inside.
The data capture form is short and sweet, displaying at the top of the page which makes it easy to complete and access. It also has a clear CTA of ‘Download Now,’ clearly focusing on conversion with this gated landing page.
Human Made has also noted the importance of naming the authors and credentials of the white paper, providing credibility and further reason for users to enter their information.
Outdoor Photography Guide -- Ebook Landing Pages Examples
The Outdoor Photography Guide is a company that provides information for nature photographers. They gate content with their ebook resources, requesting user email addresses in return for their essential photography ebook.
By labeling their ebook as ‘essential,’ they instantly provide the reason why they’ve gated this content. This makes it very clear to users that they can’t be without this ebook, making it seem a fair trade to simply provide their email address.
The page accompanies short, concise content with a visually appealing graphic displaying a beautiful image on a tablet device. This implies to users that they’ll be able to view the ebook on smaller devices and appeals to the inner photographer in users by displaying an image of someone out in nature behind a camera.
What’s also clever about this landing page is that it tells users almost straight away that entering their email address will also sign them up for the Outdoor Photography Guide newsletter. This kills two birds with one stone, collecting data for their mailing list while maintaining transparency with their audience.
With eye-catching visuals and a simple, no-frills data-capture form, this landing page is a great example of how to gate e-book content.
Eventbrite -- Webinar Experts
Event management and ticketing company Eventbrite is an expert when it comes to webinar-gated content.
Below is an example of one of their webinar landing pages, inviting users to a webinar on property investment.
The landing page features a prominent video at the top of the page with a thumbnail indicating key information about the event such as date, time, and where to access more information.
Eventbrite included the host of the event, along with the fact that the host has had 6.5K attendees, which will engage future users, showing that this host’s events are popular and aren’t to be missed.
Users can convert by clicking ‘Reserve a spot’ and are reminded that the webinar is free. Users are then taken to a simple data capture form where they can input their details.
This landing page works because it’s simple and easy to navigate and includes some key features that are compelling to users, resulting in an increased conversion rate.
The Role of Gated Content in Lead Generation
The main role of gated content in lead generation is to provide users with a compelling reason to leave their details.
Users are becoming more aware of how important their data is to companies and will be only too familiar with the fact that providing their email addresses can result in an influx of spam emails.
This is why gated content is so important. It gives a reason why users should part with their information – in return for their data, they’ll receive a great resource that they can’t access anywhere else.
Gated content will help generate leads for businesses, specifically from users who are interested in their content.
If you’re keen to get started, check out this useful resource on creating effective lead capture forms via the beehiiv system!
Setting Up Lead Capture Forms
Gated assets are generally made accessible through data capture forms, with users required to enter their email addresses and names to gain access.
When setting up lead capture forms, your form must be concise. No one wants to fill out lengthy forms asking for multiple types of contact details -- keep things simple with a few short fields to increase the chance of users completing the form.
Ideally, you’ll want to position your data capture form at the top of the page, above the fold on smaller devices. This will make it the first element users will see and further increase the number of sign-ups you receive.
You should also make it clear exactly what your audience will receive by completing the form. This may sound obvious, but reiterating what users will gain access to will remind them why they’re leaving their details and encourage them to complete the form.
Types of Gated Content To Enhance Your Marketing Strategy
There are various types of gated content that you can use, depending on your business and industry, to improve lead generation for your business.
Check out the following sections to learn about gated content examples such as ebooks, whitepapers, and webinars.
Webinars for Engagement and Lead Capture
Webinars are excellent examples of gated content, particularly if you’re looking to improve engagement and capture more leads for your business.
Webinars allow brands an opportunity to interact directly with their audience, which will not only give the brand more insights into their customers but will also add significant value to your audience, thereby improving engagement rates.
By interacting with users in real time, brands have good opportunities to provide calls to action (CTAs) to an engaged audience, increasing conversion rates even after customer data has been obtained.
Best Practices for Webinar Promotion
It’s important to adhere to best practices when using webinars as part of a content-gating strategy.
First, be sure to promote your event early and regularly remind users when the event is coming up. This will help to improve attendance, giving you more opportunities for conversion and engagement with your audience.
Another best practice is to make sure your registration process is super easy to complete.
You could consider one-click registration to improve conversions and make sure you only request essential information from your audience to increase the chances of them completing the registration form.
You’ll also want to follow up with attendees post-webinar to see if there are any further opportunities for engagement. This could be in the form of providing extra resources or inviting them to offer feedback on their experience.
Leveraging Whitepapers for Industry Insights
Whitepapers are an excellent example of gated content, providing users with exclusive information on industry insights that they won’t be able to access elsewhere.
Whitepapers can help to establish your brand as an authority on a subject/industry, instilling credibility in your audience members when engaging with your brand.
It’s important to detail the importance of a whitepaper before sharing it with a user, compelling them to leave their information in return for exclusive information that will benefit them or their business.
Whitepaper Distribution Channels
There are various channels through which whitepapers can be distributed as gating content to reach the desired target audiences.
These include the following:
Landing Pages
Pop-ups
Email
Social Media
Brand Partnerships
Press/Media
Ebooks as a Tool for Knowledge Sharing
Last in our list of gated content examples are ebooks.
Ebooks are a highly valuable form of gated content for in-depth knowledge sharing and thought leadership.
Ebooks can set your brand apart as the key resource for information on a topic, showing that you know more than just token information and can provide more detail than your competitors.
You can create ebooks using information that you already have about your brand/industry, making them a quick way of sharing more information with users who are the most interested in a topic.
Take a look at Asana’s collection of resources including ebooks to see how a company details further information for their customers.
Designing Ebooks for Maximum Impact
When designing ebooks, there are a few key points to bear in mind to ensure that your content is both informative and visually appealing.
Content should be well laid out, with correct spacing and a range of font sizes for users to choose from. This will ensure that your content is easy to read, therefore helping your readers to get the most from your content.
Your ebook should contain information that is not accessible via other places on your website, striking a difference between what is gated and what isn’t in terms of content.
The text should be counterbalanced with images to make the content easily digestible, with plenty of white space to make your ebook easy on the eye.
It’s also crucial to stick to your brand guidelines -- an ebook resource should reflect your brand colors and fonts, tying in with other content and resources created by your brand.
Check out Canva for a free online ebook creator to get started.
Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!
The Anatomy of a Successful Gated Content Landing Page
A successful gated content landing page will be compelling in its user experience, content, and design.
We’ve put together some gated content best practices to get you started with creating your own successful gated content landing page – check these out below.
Integrating User Experience in Landing Pages
A good user experience is one of the most integral features of a gated content landing page.
The aim is to collect customer information, so a seamless user experience is essential in ensuring that users complete forms and leave all data required.
Best practices include ensuring that your design is simple and easy to navigate.
Lengthy, convoluted landing pages are likely to result in a high bounce rate, with users having a bad experience and leaving your site when they can’t easily find what they’re looking for.
You should also ensure that it’s clear what users can expect when entering their details and that you shout about how compelling your resource is to increase the chances of conversion.
Optimizing Forms for User Experience
What is gated content without a well-optimized data-capture form?
It’s integral to optimize your data-capture form for user experience as well as your landing page to ensure that the page performs well as a whole.
Your data-capture form should be succinct and to the point, embedded at the top of the page with minimal scrolling required.
You should include a note on your data/privacy policy detailing how you’ll use the information that users submit. This will ensure you’re not left vulnerable to any complaints.
Crafting a Compelling Copy for Conversion
The content on your landing page is super important -- this is what encourages your audience to be interested in your gated content and makes them not want to leave the page without submitting their details.
Here are some top tips for writing persuasive copy that will entice users to enter their information and access your amazing content:
Understand the Goal: This may sound basic, but you can’t create persuasive copy without understanding the goal behind your landing page. Thoroughly research the gated content that you’re writing about to really sell it to your audience and reflect this in your landing page copy.
Use Persuasive Language: The art of persuasive language can be the reason why users convert or don’t. Consider what your audience is looking for, so you can explain why they need your gated content and ensure that your tone of voice is compatible with your user demographic.
Write Strong CTAs: Your gated content landing page lives or dies by its CTAs -- if you don’t have strong CTAs, you can forget about your page converting. Make sure that your CTA copy is clear and concise and made up of no more than 2 or 3 words. CTAs such as ‘Download Now,’ ‘Book Today,’ or ‘Buy’ are great places to start.
A/B Testing for Landing Page Copy
If you’re brimming with ideas for the copy to gated content, you should carry out some A/B Testing.
A/B Testing involves setting up multiple versions of your landing pages with the content varying slightly across each one.
You can then test these pages with your audience to see which copy results in more conversions and, therefore, which is the most successful.
A/B Testing can help enhance your conversion rates by helping you understand which content works best for your gated content.
Design Principles for Gated Content Pages
The design of your gated content landing page can make all the difference for a good conversion rate.
Gated content best practices for landing page design include the following:
Elements should be easy to read and well-spaced out.
The design must be responsive on all screen sizes.
CTAs should be prominent and clear.
The data form and CTA should be above the fold on all devices.
Visual Elements That Convert
Some key visual elements are known for conversion, and you should utilize them as part of gated content best practices.
A prominent, clear CTA button can make a big impact on the conversion rate for any landing page, particularly for gated content.
This button should hold a prime position on the page and clearly outline what you want your user to do to convert.
Other high conversion visual elements include quality visuals such as charts or images to display integral information, as well as trust icons from reputable sources to build brand credibility on your landing page.
WordPress Solutions for Gating Content
If you’re using WordPress, gated content can be easily produced via a range of plugins, tools, and theme options.
Check out the sections below to learn how to use WordPress for your gated content landing page.
Using WordPress Themes To Enhance Landing Pages
Some WordPress themes are better than others for building enhanced landing pages for gated content.
It’s important to consider the following points when choosing a WordPress theme to ensure that your site is best suited to gated content:
Customizable Templates: Design is super important for gated content landing pages, which is why you’ll need customizable templates to enable a range of converting elements for the page.
Easy Plugin Integration: You’ll likely be using a plugin or two on your landing page for the data-capture form, so easy integration with plugins is crucial for your WordPress theme.
Clean Design: A clean, professional design may seem like a given, but this is especially important when focusing on pages for lead generation.
Theme Customization Tips
There are a few ways that you can customize a WordPress theme to fit the specific needs of a gated content landing page.
WordPress-gated content can be highly effective, especially when using these theme customization tips:
Use Theme Editor: You can use the WordPress theme editor to customize theme files with a text editor. This is a quick way of adding elements to a specific template and ensuring that a landing page is completely mobile-friendly.
Accessibility: Make sure your theme is easy to read in terms of font size and color and include alt text for images to ensure that users with screen readers can access content, too.
WordPress Plugins for Content Gating
There are a range of WordPress plugins available to make content gating an easier process.
Here are some favorites among WordPress users for facilitating gated content landing pages:
Bloom: Bloom is a plugin by Elegant Themes that allows users to create forms via a simple drag-and-drop editor. This option is great if you want to avoid coding and want control over where your gated content is displayed. Access starts at $89 per year.
Formidable Forms: If you’re looking for a plugin that works seamlessly with most WordPress themes and page builders, check out Formidable Forms. These data-capture forms are quick and easy and have the option of adding a PDF download button, too -- there’s a free version available, plus paid plans from $39.50 per year.
OptinMonster: OptinMonster is an opt-in plugin that allows you to blur/hide content below a certain point on a WordPress page, allowing users a sneak peek at your content before encouraging them to submit their details. OptinMonster offers plans starting at $16 per month.
Here’s a full guide to recommended WordPress plugins for gated content.
Content Gating With Shortcodes
WordPress shortcodes can also be used to easily embed content that would normally require complicated code.
For example, you could use the shortcode [contact-form] to embed a form on a gated landing page. Shortcodes can complement the use of plugins, allowing you to expand on a page and add further detail.
How To Create Gated Content That Converts
The main purpose behind gated content is for it to convert. There’s no point in content gating if it won’t result in increasing data capture.
So how do you create high-quality gated content that has the best chance of converting?
Check out the following step-by-step process to learn how to create high-quality content, from ideation to execution.
Content Creation: Crafting Quality Gated Assets
Creating your gated assets is arguably the most important step in the process of creating gated content landing pages.
You’ll need to ensure that your assets are as valuable as possible to users to make sure your audience will be desperate to hand over their information.
This will involve making sure that your assets are unique and focusing on the relevance of the assets to your audience members in order to provide them with the most tailored assets.
Here’s a guide for content creation best practices to get you started.
Developing a Content Calendar
A content calendar can be super useful in ensuring that a gated content strategy is followed without a hitch.
This calendar will indicate what content is published and when, making planning and executing a campaign as simple as possible.
Ideation: Brainstorming Topics for Gated Content
Brainstorming topics for gated content can give you more ideas about what your audience may want to receive from you.
Think about the demographics and interests of your target audience to understand what will resonate with them and drive conversions.
For example, if your audience is women and they’re interested in health, providing an ebook on women’s health is a resource that is likely to drive conversions.
Analyzing Audience Feedback
If you’ve recently carried out an audience feedback campaign, make sure to utilize this data when brainstorming topics for your gated content.
Perhaps your audience wants more opportunities to interact with your brand. In this scenario, offering access to a webinar via a data-capture form would improve your lead generation, while also giving your audience what they want.
Measuring the Success of Your Gated Content Strategy
Tracking and analyzing the performance of your gated content landing pages will be integral in measuring the success of these campaigns.
You can analyze a landing page by looking at different metrics and KPIs, as well as tracking gated email addresses captured by forms to see how many leads you’ve received from a campaign.
Performance Metrics for Gated Content
Some key performance metrics that you should track for gated content include the following:
Conversion Rate: Tracking the conversion rate on your gated content landing pages will help you understand the percentage of users who are leaving their email addresses, resulting in potential conversions for your business.
Lead Quality: It’s important to monitor the lead quality from your gated email addresses to ensure that your landing page is producing the best types of customers. If lead quality isn’t good, you can always make changes to improve it.
Take a look at this beehiiv blog for our top five email marketing metrics for tracking and analyzing content performance.
Leveraging Analytics for Content Optimization
Using popular analytics platforms such as Google Analytics can help you understand what works well on your landing pages and what could be improved.
For example, it’s worth monitoring the bounce rate of your gated content landing pages to ensure that users aren’t leaving the page without converting.
If your bounce rate is high, your page may not be user-friendly or could be missing vital information that would result in conversions.
Conclusion
This guide should leave you feeling confident and excited about creating your own gated content landing pages. Let’s get you started, so you can improve your lead generation strategy as soon as possible.
beehiiv can help!
With an easy-to-use editor, beehiiv allows you to restrict access to content on an individual or site-wide basis, with email gating and pop-ups available to use.
Popups can be customized to display once every 7 days so as not to frustrate users, and copy/design can be customized to increase conversion rate.
To get started with your gated content strategy, sign up for a free, 30-day trial with beehiiv today. You can start collecting subscribers in just a few simple clicks!
FAQ
What is a gated landing page?
A gated landing page is a web page concealing certain content from users.
This page will likely feature a data-capture form requiring an email address in return for showing the gated content.
What is gated content?
Gated content usually takes the form of resources such as ebooks, whitepapers, or webinars, which are only accessible by completing a data-capture form on a website.
Brands use gated content to obtain more leads from their audience members and to build lists of users that are interested in specific resources.
How do I create a website with gated content?
You can create a website with gated content by using platforms such as WordPress, via the use of coding or plugins to create forms, or beehiiv, through the use of gated content and popup sign-up forms.
Learn how to gate content with beehiiv here!
What is an ungated landing page?
An ungated landing page is a page on a website featuring content that is fully accessible. This is in contrast to content that is hidden by a data-capture form and therefore known as ‘gated.’
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