Today's successful businesses all have a solid online presence, but the unfortunate news is that an average user's attention span consists of mere 8 seconds. You must engage and deliver to attract visitors and convert them into business clients. And that’s on top of ensuring those clients find your website at all.
The SaaS industry is only moving forward with no signs of slowing down, as cloud software has become an integral part of many internal company operations and the personal life of customers. And when you have set on a mission to build the best SaaS website, there is a list of things to consider. The competitors are not sitting idly by, so it’s better to keep up if a new business wants to succeed in marketing its cloud-based product to companies and customers.
Luckily, with more people entering the industry, more staples, best practices, and golden features emerge for newcomers to learn from and incorporate into their work. You need your website to stand out and, even more importantly — be a solid SaaS website. The one that presents your product well explains its value and convinces your target audience that it’s the single thing they have been missing.
This article will explore what you need to create a SaaS website that will be an excellent addition to your marketing strategy. Let’s start from the beginning.
It’s a marketing website created to promote a Software-as-a-Service product for an online business.
How does it differ from other types of websites?
A SaaS website offers more interactivity than a simple informational website. Such a platform must guide users through the presented product to explain its use and value, but there’s more to it in the form of subscription services and test trials, for example.
Based on previous comparisons, we can deduce a few essential features of a good website for SaaS:
Presents your product professionally. “Never judge a book by its cover” does not work in marketing. Think to yourself: how long do you stay on a website that looks poorly? What thoughts about the company behind it jump into your mind?
While the design isn’t everything regarding the website — a thought we will return to later — you want to look clean, modern, and professional. Let people see that you have put in the effort. Clients appreciate the quality that comes with it.
Guides users through your product. The main goal of a SaaS website for sale is to promote a product. If you have built functional software to solve your customers’ pains and needs, help this service promote itself. A good explanation goes a long way: include a step-by-step visual presentation through a web page, provide images and screenshots, explain the central value, and offer to test the product with a strategically-placed Call-to-Action. Users need a clear idea of the service and how it will help.
Provides a Demo. This point comes hand in hand with the previous one, whether it will be a demo version, a free trial period, or something similar. You have hooked your customers with a marketing website and now engage them by showing the service in action. If they are hesitant about its value, this is an excellent step to demonstrate what use it brings to their lives.
Before you start selling anything with your website, it is crucial to determine your target audience. It will only matter how outstanding your SaaS product is if you market it to the right crowd with no use or interest. Let’s figure out an ideal type of customer to focus all your future effort on.
What is a buyer persona? It is a theoretical portrait of your potential customer. According to relevant data and research about your business, products, and services, the buyer persona represents an ideal client.
A buyer persona will help you with the following:
A buyer persona can include such information as:
Overall, the more specific you can get with compiling such a profile, the better insights you will deduce from it. You can start with just one persona, but there is no limit to the number of profiles you can create. The amount depends on your type of business.
When creating a buyer persona, answer these questions:
What is an ICP? An Ideal Customer Profile is a company's version of a buyer’s persona, to put it simply. ICPs are used for sales to target better the potential audience that will be interested in your offer. While a buyer persona uses more qualitative information, a sales ICP focuses more on quantitative.
Examples of questions to ask when creating an ICP:
Answer these questions for your business and product, and you should know who your clients will be.
Competitor analysis is a significant step to gathering information from industry leaders, deducing best practices on your particular market, as well as analyzing possible mistakes you would want to avoid.
Here’s a simple guide to performing market analysis:
A more complex way to better understand your market is business analysis. If you have an idea for your project but need to bring clarity and transform it into an actionable plan, business analysis services are precisely what you need.
Business analysis can include the following:
If you want to hire a specialist to perform this extensive work, consider ordering professional business analysis services from industry experts.
To understand how to build a SaaS website, you must compile a list of technical requirements well before the start of development. Without such a list, the whole process quickly becomes a mess. Creating any website is a complex endeavor with too many things to track. Doing everything in order and keeping track of intermediary goals is critical to staying productive.
Each company has its way of presenting technical requirements. You are free to use any tool you are comfortable with and create such a document in any way you see fit, as long as it is:
A technical requirements document is a brief of features a future website must include and any additional information vital to understanding the task better. Consider including the following:
Every website has a particular structure. Depending on the goals and needs that this website needs to solve, its structure varies accordingly. This is why it’s vital to define technical requirements beforehand, so webpages are planned in advance to deliver on your business needs.
Web pages can be generally divided into two types:
Which web pages are usually included in a SaaS website?
There’s an excellent platform for website structure creation. Here you can create a low-fidelity wireframe of your future website and export it in high resolution.
First, your website will need domain and hosting. A domain is a unique name of your website’s URL, and hosting is where your website’s data will be stored. A range of platforms provides services for buying a domain name or order hosting, separate or shared. Your domain can have any ending, like com, org, net, or a unique one, depending on where you buy it.
Some online builders provide in-built services: you pick your domain while you build your website, and once you publish it, the hosting is handled by a platform, among other things like security and automated updates. We prefer to build SaaS with Webflow, as aside from being a great design-oriented, low-code website builder, we don’t have to worry about side services with it, as domain name and hosting are included in any plan.
User experience and user interface are two customer-facing features, the value of which cannot be overlooked. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, UX and UI are two separate things.
We can determine four main points of UX:
User experience is more important than the user interface. While it is crucial to keep UI design looking appealing, it is UX that will ensure users actually care to interact with your website at all. Design should be functional first and aesthetically-pleasing — second. It has no point if a navigation bar looks trendy but is impossible to access. Structure and design your website with user experience in mind.
User tests, for example, are a practice that is used more rarely than they should be, as they bring invaluable research on user behavior and authentic interactions. Use acquired data to optimize user flow better and further enhance the customer’s journey.
When it comes to SaaS website designs, there are a few general trends:
A creative approach in UI will help you stand out, but remember that the general design shouldn’t drive attention away from a product you are trying to market. The main goal of both UX and UI is to guide customers through the software you present.
Motion design is more of an addition to the overall design of your website. However, it is something to pay attention to. Static blocks of text can get very dull quickly if it is not a study or research you are reading. Websites need to be visually exciting and diverse while reducing friction in browsing web pages: the simpler the way of acquiring information, the more traction it will get. This is why video content gets as much traffic as it gets today. And what about animations?
Consider the value of adding animations to your website:
To summarize: keep your clients entertained while providing them with helpful info.
One of the best solutions for SaaS website development is incorporating low-code and no-code solutions.
What are low-code solutions best suited for:
Since a lot of time, money, and skillful specialists are required to start a SaaS company in the first place, turning to low-code to create a marketing website is an excellent option. For example, our favorite tool, Webflow, is one of such platforms that acts as an advanced website builder that brings various benefits to the process. Of course, nowadays, there’s a variety of low-code solutions, with more emerging regularly, but all of them share something in common: the convenience it brings to the table.
Let’s see some benefits of low-code in the example of Webflow SaaS:
As you can see, there are a lot of advantages to building a website using a low-code platform and Webflow specifically. If you are curious about Webflow pricing plans and what they include, we’ve previously prepared an article on how much Webflow costs.
If you are looking to expand the functionality of your website, as is typically the case with SaaS websites, third-party API integrations are here to assist. What type of integrations can your web app include?
Third-party software can be in the form of:
If you have a specific need, chances are there is an integration to solve it.
Connecting marketing tools to your website is a crucial step that shouldn’t be missed. Those tools will help you:
Let’s look at 5 of the most essential tools to incorporate.
One of the most helpful platforms in marketing as this service collects data from your website or web app and packages it into concise, manageable, and insightful reports. This information will help you drive valuable conclusions, such as comparing visits to different web pages and providing insights into user browser settings, operating systems, and traffic sources. Google Analytics is undoubtedly the first integration to assist your marketing efforts.
It’s a tag management system that allows you to configure and deploy tags for your website from a comprehensive web-based interface. You will get access to such features as tag organization, version control, third-party tag templates, and security features. Google Tag Manager will assist you in reducing errors in tag configuration, better-optimizing tag deployment overall, and modifying the tags as you see fit.
This software will help you monitor your website's traffic, optimize the Google rankings, and acquire relevant data to make efficient decisions about your website's appearance in search results. Alongside Google Analytics, you can perform a more advanced marketing analysis of your website that will further influence certain technical decisions about its operation.
A tracking or marketing pixel feature is a literal one-by-one pixel used to track users' behavior on your website, analyze website conversions and traffic, and some other data similar to cookies. This little thing is your magic trick to optimize better digital advertisement, marketing campaigns and increase conversion rate and overall website appeal. A wide choice of integrations will provide you with such services.
Both tools are meant to track user behavior on your website: how they get around web pages, what buttons they click on, what they ignore altogether, etc. Such software is invaluable for getting an idea about your customer’s journey. You can use the data collected by Mouseflow of Hotjar to make informed decisions on changes and implementations needed for your website to improve user experience. And the better the customer experience, the better the conversion rate.
Search engine optimization is essential to ensure your website appears in Google for potential clients to find. The better your Google rankings are, the more traffic you get — the more new customers you can attract.
If you are curious about all the specifications, Google has an extremely extensive and detailed document on Google SEO basics. Here’s a quick overview of what technical SEO should include:
What is worth including in a technical requirements document? Many website-builder platforms have in-built functionality to manage search engine optimization, or you find professional assistance. Keeping up the previous example, a Webflow SEO expert can help optimize a website on Webflow.
A team of professionals can make your life easier by doing all the heavy lifting for you. If you feel overwhelmed by the amount of information you need to consider and the technical work to put in, we would love to help! Here at Warmdevs, we have successfully delivered 300+ digital products for our clients worldwide for over 6 years. Our team has earned recognition as Webflow Professional Partners and received various achievements from platforms like Clutch and Upwork. We have solid experience creating a SaaS, Webflow website for any business and will gladly help you on your journey. Check the full list of our Webflow development service
Creating a marketing website for a SaaS product is a complex task requiring careful consideration. While your SaaS product is definitely the show's star, it will only be possible to market it properly to your target audience with a website created and optimized specifically to solve this matter.
This article discussed what makes a good SaaS website, the technical requirements and features you must consider before creating it, and possible integrations to implement during the development. We hope this information was helpful to you and you will use the industry’s best practices when creating a product for yourself!
No, it is not the same. While Software-as-a-Service or Saas is a cloud-based app hosted online and delivered through the web, a website is simply a medium to showcase and view content through an online channel.
The best practices of a SaaS website include: 1. Having a professional design. 2. Providing a presentation of a SaaS product through guides and images. 3. Providing a trial version for users to experience its value in practice.
There are online platforms that provide low-code and no-code solutions. For example, developing SaaS on Webflow, Wix, and Squarespace allows you to create a professional website without writing code. The same goes for SaaS. While it is possible to build a SaaS product by yourself, it is still best to find professional developers and designers if you have yet to gain experience in the field.
Schedule a consultation with our representative to talk about development services with no obligations from your side. Take a part in a professional discussion that will provide you
