ConvertKit's builder handles forms—MailerLite's handles funnels
The coffee shop on Westlake has a chalkboard menu that changes every morning, wiped clean at six and rewritten in dusty yellow by seven. Same ritual, different words, same crowd waiting to see what landed at the top.
ConvertKit’s landing page builder won’t replace your Carrd subscription—but MailerLite’s might
Three newsletter platforms ship built-in landing page tools with wildly different ambitions.
ConvertKit, MailerLite, and Beehiiv all advertise landing page builders. Only one of them lets you build something you’d actually send cold traffic to. ConvertKit’s tool is a form wrapper—fast to deploy, clean templates, zero flexibility beyond colour and button text. MailerLite’s builder offers multi-page funnels, custom domains, A/B testing, and enough layout control that you can ditch Unbounce for most use cases. Beehiiv sits in the middle: beautiful templates, decent customisation, but no multivariate testing and no funnel sequencing.
The decision isn’t about features—it’s about where the landing page lives in your acquisition flow. If you’re running a single opt-in offer and the page lives at newsletter.com/subscribe, ConvertKit’s builder is enough. If you’re testing three lead magnets across paid channels and need heatmaps, exit intent, and thank-you redirects, MailerLite’s builder saves you $29/month on a separate tool. Beehiiv works when aesthetics matter more than split-test velocity—think brand partnerships and sponsored landing pages where the URL needs to look polished but the traffic is warm.
Pricing changes the equation. ConvertKit’s builder is free on all tiers but caps you at five published pages on the Creator plan ($15/month for up to 300 subscribers). MailerLite includes unlimited pages and A/B tests starting at $9/month for 500 subscribers. Beehiiv’s builder is free on all plans, including the free tier, but you’ll hit template fatigue fast—there are eight layouts, and six of them feel like the same centre-aligned hero block.
TACTIC
When your newsletter archive becomes invisible to readers who remember the topic but not the title
Most newsletter platforms index email subject lines but ignore body text. That means readers searching your archive for “the thing about Stripe webhooks” find nothing if your subject was “Payment processors retry differently.” Substack’s search crawls full text; ConvertKit’s doesn’t. Beehiiv and MailerLite fall somewhere in between, indexing excerpts but not paragraphs. If your back catalogue drives affiliate revenue or course conversions, search indexing isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s the difference between a functioning asset and a dead archive.
See what actually gets indexed
WORTH READING
Double opt-in costs you a quarter of your signups—here’s when that trade makes sense
Confirmed opt-in cuts spam complaints and keeps deliverability high, but it also kills 20–40% of legitimate subscribers who never click the confirmation link. The math changes depending on where your traffic comes from. If you’re running Facebook ads to a cold audience, single opt-in often wins—volume matters more than list hygiene in the first ninety days. If you’re embedding forms on high-authority content and your open rates fund sponsorships, double opt-in protects your sender reputation. The data shows when each approach pays off, and it’s rarely the configuration your platform defaults to.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
WordPress staging environments sync in two directions—most operators push the wrong way
One-click staging clones make testing plugins easy, but the sync direction determines whether you lose data. Pushing staging changes down to production works for design tweaks and code. Pulling live data up to staging works when you need to debug a form submission issue or test a membership plugin against real transactions. Most managed hosts default to push-down, which means any content published on production between your staging snapshot and your push gets overwritten. The fix is a two-second radio button, but only if you know to look for it before you click deploy.
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