Designing has never been more critical in a space and time where websites have become the digital equivalent of flagships. And that statement stands to reason—we've never asked so much of aesthetics and functionality in the digital world.
At its core, a well-designed website is expected to be the comprehensive nucleus of nearly everything a SaaS business tries to achieve, from generating leads to providing helpful information. And although plenty of companies do at least some things right when it comes to SaaS web design, there are plenty more that throw best practices—and good taste, for that matter—right off the monitor and out the window.
Although there's no one-size-fits-all method for B2B SaaS website design, some universal elements apply across the board, such as using colour, imagery, and placement or even leveraging subtext. Beyond that, just as many are only essential in context—and understanding how and why they can make or break important decisions in the future.
So to provide some real insight into a concept that has so much variance, we've decided to focus on a select few that we think will give the best SaaS website design inspirations and explain why they work, so you can glean as much as possible, apply them to your efforts, and hopefully enjoy similar success.
A cluttered website design for SaaS is like a messy room—it is difficult to find what you're searching for and can be overwhelming. Your site should have a clean, straightforward design, easy-to-understand content, and a simple navigation menu.
You're screwed without a website maintenance plan, so be sure to put one in place.
Limit using too many colours or fancy fonts that make your website look like a circus.
Keep it simple, and your visitors will thank you!
In today's digital age, people access websites on all devices—from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets. When searching for SaaS website design inspiration, you'll notice that every example is mobile-friendly and responsive.
Ensuring your website looks great and works seamlessly across all devices is imperative. Don't make your visitors pinch and zoom to read your content or click on buttons. Instead, ensure the website adapts to different screen sizes and provides a smoother experience, no matter how your audience accesses it. A team of Webflow developers can help you achieve this responsive design effortlessly.
Your SaaS website design should be as distinctive as your software solution. Avoid utilizing copy-and-paste SaaS website templates or generic stock images so that your site doesn't look like everyone else's.
Investing in custom illustrations, photos, or graphics that reflect the brand's personality can make its website truly one of a kind. Add clever, witty elements that make visitors smile and remember your website long after they've left. Strong brand identity design ensures visual consistency across layout, typography, and colour choices. Some sites, like Superside, demonstrate how maintaining this consistency can create a more cohesive and user-friendly experience, without relying on overly decorative or complex design.
A call to action (CTA) is like the icing on the cake of your SaaS website. The link or button tells the visitors what to do next—whether it's getting in touch with sales, downloading an ebook, or signing up for a free trial.
The CTA should be eye-catching, prominent, and witty. You could say something boring like, "Sign Up Now," but why not try something like "Join the Cool Kids Club" or "Let's Get this Party Started!"
Get creative and have fun with your CTAs—it's an opportunity to make your visitors smile and take action.
Your website should grab visitors' attention faster than a cheetah on a caffeine high. Use bold colours, captivating visuals, and witty headlines to make the site stand out.
Try adding some surprises that make your visitors go, "Wow!" A hilarious GIF or hidden easter egg that pops up when they least expect it is a great way to keep your audience engaged.
After all, who said your software couldn't be fun?
Do you want visitors to trust your brand? Social proof is the secret potion that assists in filling that void.
Anything from happy customers' testimonials to case studies and success stories can show visitors why they should choose your software over others.
Here are some benefits of showcasing social proof on your SaaS website:
But why settle for mundane testimonials when you can have fun with them? Ask your clients to share their feedback humorously or creatively; that makes your visitors laugh and builds trust simultaneously.
Your brand's story is like juicy gossip visitors can't get enough of. Use engaging and compelling copywriting to tell your brand's story in a memorable and shareable way. Don't hesitate to inject personality, wit, and humour into the content.
Below are a few reasons to storytell like a boss:
Share case studies or anecdotes that make visitors cry, laugh, or high-five their screens. Be a storyteller and give your visitors high-quality brand stories that leave them craving more.
Quality over quantity is the name of the game when it comes to content. Don't be afraid to give your website's articles a makeover when redesigning the SaaS website. Say goodbye to long-winded paragraphs that put your visitor to sleep faster than a lullaby.
Instead, opt for succinct content that keeps visitors entertained and engaged long enough to take action.
The table below highlights a few reasons to consider content conundrums during a website redesign and their advantages.
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Reasons to Consider the Content Conundrum During the SaaS Website Redesign Process |
Advantages |
|---|---|
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Outdated or Irrelevant Content |
Updating and refreshing content can ensure that it aligns with your current SaaS marketing positions, target audience, and business objectives. |
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Inconsistent Brand Message |
You can reinforce your brand identity and aid users in understanding your value proposition by ensuring the brand message is consistent across your website |
|
Poor Content Organization |
Well-organized content can improve the user experience by making it easy for visitors to find relevant information, increasing engagement and reducing bounce rates. |
If you get stuck in a rut, you can always check out the best content writing tools for SEO to give you a competitive edge.
Do you want to know a fantastic method to increase your website's visual appeal?
Try including high-quality images and videos.
Here are some do's and don't of adding images and videos to your SaaS website:
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Do's |
Don't |
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Optimize images and videos for web performance, ensuring smooth playback and fast loading times |
Utilize large file sizes or formats that result in buffering issues or slowing performance. |
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Include captions and alt tags for images to improve SEO and accessibility. This can be done for subtitles and transcripts for videos to further boost the user experience. |
Neglect subtitles, transcripts, captions, and alt tags, making it challenging for SEO purposes or challenging for visitors with a disability. |
|
Strategically place images and videos on the website, such as testimonials, product pages, and landing pages (see our SaaS landing page design examples) to enhance conversions and user engagement |
Randomly place videos and images without considering their impact or relevance. |
A picture tells a thousand words, so you can imagine the effect a video can have. Both mediums can also aid in explaining complex concepts and make the site more attractive to visitors. When choosing videos and images, ensure they are relevant to your posted content and don't interfere with the page's loading times.
SaaS Website designs with minimal elements are a common sight these days, and rightfully so. It's easier for visitors to engage with an intuitive site, and this can also assist in lowering its bounce rate.
While busy with the SaaS website redesign, ensure the interface is straightforward to use, with content and elements arranged in a way that makes sense to visitors.
Strongest Element: Ease of understanding the offering
Coupa delivers value, clarity, and insight right from their home page. Outside of providing a well-crafted explainer video that clocks in at a near-perfect 50 seconds, they give visitors their value prop from the second they hit the site. Language like “Spend Smarter” backed by the idea of getting both visibility and control out of business spending, especially paired with the underlying video clips, gives the perfect taste of the offering. The swooshing design below creates the perfect space to deliver a key tagline: The All-In-One Business Spend Management Platform.
Other Strengths
Strongest Element: Clean, simple view of a comprehensive solution
Although Freshbooks' offering has tons of features, they've found a simple, straightforward, and insightful way to put it all into context right on their home page. Just underneath a well-crafted value prop, complementary image, and a carefully crafted short list of high-view benefits, Freshbooks not only breaks down all of its solution's handiest features but includes a first-hand look of the interface in action with every example perfectly showcasing how simple yet powerful it really is—not to mention aesthetically pleasing!
Other Strengths
Strongest Element: Turning complexity into simplicity
Not all SaaS businesses have the luxury of a simple and straightforward product, but that doesn't seem to stop Splunk. Despite deep offerings in IT, IoT, security, and business analytics, they've done everything possible to keep visitors from getting overwhelmed on their site. A first visit introduces their solution, The Data-to-Everything Platform, then the Find Out How button immediately directs visitors to a combination explainer video/case study that exemplifies their offering in a context more familiar to most than something like IoT: cars. This is a recurring theme throughout their site, as they pair digestible images with simple explanations and round it all out with helpful videos to make sure visitors understand the complexity of their offering in the easiest way possible.
Other Strengths:
Strongest Element: Leveraging brand purpose and identity
The moment you land on Cornerstone's site, there's no doubt that they are all about people. Between the softened background full of smiling images and language like “realizing potential”, Cornerstone drives home the idea that personal and professional growth aren't mutually exclusive. This work-life balance is reinforced in text and images—and therefore subtext—throughout the site. Even their navigation bar has a link to their community-based elements and resources.
Other Strengths
Strongest Element: Defining purpose
Much like Cornerstone, this SaaS website design inspiration's website leaves an immediate and unquestionable impression on its visitors, making the company's purpose exceptionally clear: they want to use their business to make the world a better place. Just below the main image, Blackbaud supports this idea further by sharing related accolades and then introducing their solution with compelling language and content centred around driving impact for social good, like the “Build a Better World” button, which directs visitors to a comprehensive look at their vision and purpose. Everything about their site, from images to text and subtext, shares the same positive messaging, not just about what they do—but why.
Other Strengths
Strongest Element: General design
Simply put, most of Zendesk's designs are quirky, and we mean that in a good way. While they share some common elements with other SaaS websites, many are less conventional, like their colour palette—but it works well. The omnipresent peach colour promotes calmness in colour psychology, and the greens, growth and support. Their use of basic shapes is a persistent motif in both illustrations and photographic images and reinforces the concept of building blocks while also visually and conceptually blending reality with the digital world with ease, a recurring theme in their content. All combined, it ensures they get noticed and stands apart upon the first visit.
Other Strengths
Strongest Element: “Beautiful business” exemplified
We'll try not to gush, but Xero absolutely nails their tagline at every turn. While light blue is their brand color, they take every opportunity to leverage lush, gorgeous colours in all of their imagery, which also happens to be custom and perfectly framed. In addition, the layout and flow of content are natural and intuitive, the spacing wastes little yet perfectly paces the information without being overwhelming, and all elements feel quite cohesive. It shows an attention to detail that few other sites ever really master.
Other Strengths
Strongest Element: Knowing their audience
In today's world, analytics are everywhere, and few seem to know that better than this SaaS website design inspiration. The top of GoodData's home page says it all. If the language and images visitors first encounter aren't examples enough, the fact that GoodData references Gartner, one of the most trusted sources of information, certainly is. But despite how deep data can dive, and how much insight it can provide, it's still often intimidating for a lot of people, and GoodData seems to understand that as well—everything about their design and presentation both simplifies and exemplifies the concepts around data-based business intelligence, making it digestible for just about everyone.
Other Strengths
Strongest Element: A true value prop
Outside of the compelling design of their website overall, the company does two things exceptionally well: prove that they wholeheartedly believe in the HubSpot inbound methodology of maximizing the customer experience and positioning themselves to help businesses grow. On their homepage, they do both with genuine authority. Landing here alone gives you two options to get HubSpot free without even scrolling, but if you do or hit the nav bar, you'll find even more opportunities to do so. They are truly an industry standard from head to toe, and you'll be hard-pressed to find an area where they don't excel.
Other Strengths:
Strongest Element: Interactive example
We'll go over some important elements of this SaaS website design inspiration approach below, but it is absolutely impossible not to take notice of what they've executed perfectly on their home page: taking their offering and making it truly interactive from the get-go. In four easy steps, Twilio shows you just how easy a seemingly complicated process can be just by using your cell phone to send a couple of text messages. Not only is it exemplary in terms of its solution, but it's simple enough for almost anyone to do—and fun to play with at that! Giving users this mini sandbox generates interest with simple curiosity and use, and while it won't likely leave you yelling, “Content and imagery be damned!”, it certainly makes a strong case that encouraging the user to put the solution right in their hand is absolutely one of the most compelling ways to catch their attention and convince them to move forward.
Other Strengths:
As you can see, not all of the best SaaS website design inspirations are similar, let alone perfect, in terms of aesthetics or functionality, but they all share one thing in common: awareness.
What makes up a large portion of some of the best designs are those that truly understand their audience and know how to present themselves compellingly, bridging the gap between business and customer while providing a seamless and helpful experience that will leave an impression.
If you need help growing your SaaS business predictably, why not contact us for assistance? Roketto is a SaaS website design firm that can take your company to the next level, whether it's development, content creation, or techy upgrades, we have you covered.