What Makes A SaaS Website Great?
A clean layout should not be all that your site offers visitors. The website also needs to be able to convert those visitors into leads. Your website design should follow all the best practices to engage, impress, convince, and convert visitors.
Before we look at some great SaaS Website examples, let's look at some of the tactics and approaches that drive SEO, Validation and Conversion.
SaaS Product Visuals
Never ever underestimate the importance of product visuals. This is where SaaS companies that have not invested in a fantastic UX/UI for their software end up hurting themselves in customer acquisition too.
Just like an ecommerce visitor browses through product photos to get a sense of what they are buying, B2B SaaS buyers need to see visuals that they feel comfortable just to convert on a free trial.
Building confidence is a key step in driving conversions and most visitors will not gain confidence if they see no product visuals or see really badly designed product screenshots.
Hierarchy & Storytelling
Your navigation should be able to communicate what you do as much as your content does. With the right logical heirarchy, choosing the right words and designing your navigation you can provide insight into what your product does before anyone even hits a second page.
With hierarchy is also choosing the right pages to tell the story that you want visitors to see. This is both about helping visitors find the information they are looking for fast but also about providing your story of value and validation in a way to convince them to take action - a trial or demo.
Having pages for how your solution works for different roles or size companies, features that the audience most cares to understand and easy tools to evaluate the value are imperative to conversion.
Combined with hierarchy is the content layout and how you tell stories. Each page should build the story of the product, feature or usage. Just placing content on a page isn't strategic whereas thinking about how you present your arguments in favor of your product in the right order will significantly impact the results you get from your site.
Pricing & Buying Cycle Conversions
Your strategy for presenting pricing is very important for B2B SaaS websites. Buyers want to understand the investment early in their journey, but depending on your pricing model you may have different requirements for what and how early your present pricing.
The challenge is that not providing any insight at all into the investment and cost of your product can turn off many buyers from even considering or converting.
The other key factor is having multiple ways for people to convert. Yes, we want a lot of CTAs for our registration, trials or demos but sometimes visitors early in their buying cycle are not ready for that yet. A smart strategy is to think of buyers in research, validation, conversion or closing stages and what content and actions are needed to support visitors in all of those stages.
Great Web User Experience & Interface Design
Beauty can be strategic. The overall look of the website impacts the confidence building and validation. It is shown that sites with less aesthetic pleasing sites and inconsistent design paradigms have higher bounce rates.
A great design uses consistency as a way to build familiarity for the visitor as they browse. Headlines all look the same, actions use the same colors, structurally the site has consistency so they do not have to re-learn the paradigms of how information is presented.
The other aspect of great design besides consistency is subtlety and not over designing. Simplicity should make messages and visuals the hero and subtle lines, shadows, overlap, colors are used to take a simple design and make it well thought out.
Anyone can design, but the best SaaS website designers in the world are able to use whitespace, subtle design and consistency to create a site that both looks great and produces conversions.