Is your company website capable of reeling in a new customer in 0.05 seconds? If not, you may have a problem on your hands. It takes only 50 milliseconds for a visitor to decide whether to stay on your site or bounce.
A visually appealing SaaS website design is the face of your company - think of your website homepage as your first date with a potential customer. Are your content and design engaging enough to warrant a second date?
Let’s take a closer look at the methods and benefits of optimizing your SaaS website design to fuel growth. After reading this post, you should have all the tools to level up your website, positioning your business for maximum growth.
A SaaS Website Design Optimized to Fuel Growth: What do You Need to do?
What does a great SaaS website look like?
We know it’s got to be visually appealing. As we mentioned above, you have only 50 milliseconds to grasp the attention of your customer. But, the user experience is even more critical because you only have seven seconds to engage them.
A service-based business needs a website that reflects its brand, mission, and product, but it should be designed to convert visitors into leads and drive revenue.
A delightful user experience is the anchor of optimizing your website design, and Lean Labs works with deserving brands on their web design to connect with your customers and drive revenue.
With a robust design and through data and structured tests, your website will deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right person.
How to Analyze Your Website Performance
Don’t worry; we’re not going to make you do any math here. But from a high level, there are tools you can use to run tests on your website to gather data and inform your design and marketing decisions going forward.
Make a list of the metrics you want to measure. We’ll look at four major ones to start.
Analytics
Use Google Analytics to access data and improve performance. You can visit any page on your website and check real-time data.
You can find out what your best-performing pages are. Additionally, you can also discover where your viewers visited those pages from, the number of clicks, time spent, unique page views, and bounce rates.
Page Speed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is free and tells you how to optimize the load speed of your website. It guides you through the process and shows you exactly where problems lie and how to fix them.
With a scoring system of 1-100, it’s intuitive and easy to make adjustments and optimize the performance of your website.
User Behavior
To find out what is and isn’t working on your website, you need to know what your users are doing.
- How do people interact with individual pages and sections?
- Where do they spend the most time?
- Do they struggle with a particular element or get stuck and bounce?
Using heatmaps is a lead nurturing best practice. These maps show you which parts of your website attract the most attention, and session recordings show visitors' actions when they enter your site. Together, they inform your strategy for improving the user experience.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is crucial for directing organic traffic to your website. To rank on the first pages of search engines, your pages and content should be relevant, authoritative, and answer the questions your audience has.
Use a tool like SEMRush to audit your website, gather information on organic keywords, and inform your strategy to optimize SEO.
Identify Problems With Your SaaS Website Design
Once you have some metrics to assess your website performance, you can identify problems that might be causing your customers to stumble and bounce off the page.
Is your site hard to navigate? Are the next steps defined and easy for users to take? Part of staying on a website is being directed to take action. Your users want to engage with you, but there’s nothing more frustrating than broken links and clunky next steps.
Do pages take an age to load? If your website pages take more than three seconds to load, say goodbye to nearly half of your customers. Part of the user experience is how quickly they can interact with your website.
Is your copy compelling? Without great headings, sub-headings, and copy that speaks to customers’ problems and desires, how will you guide them on a journey that ends with them raving about you?
Images also matter. All images on your site should be clear and complement your copy. Aside from copy, you should have content in the form of articles, videos, podcasts, and other educational content designed to attract, engage, and delight your audience. Is that library of content easy to find?
Do you use social proof or testimonials? Do they look genuine? Modern users can discern when reviews or testimonials are made up.
We’ve highlighted a few problems here, but try to view them more as opportunities. With that in mind, let’s look at how to optimize your SaaS website design to fuel growth.
How to Optimize Your SaaS Website Design
Straight away, you can make small changes that could bring big success. It might feel overwhelming at first but focus on the following points to start as you mean to go on.
Your Homepage
Let’s start where many of your customers will; your homepage.
Your homepage should include your unique value proposition above the fold. You have to convey what you have to offer quickly. What does success look like, and how do you help your customers get there?
The copy on your homepage should be clear and concise. A great headline can convert more customers before reading the rest of your copy. Even if it piques interest, the rest of your copy should tell a story that resonates with your potential customers and provide a logical conversion roadmap.
Be sure to highlight benefits over features, and write about your customer, not the product. Buyers want to know if you can solve their problems and if they can see themselves working with you, before learning how.
User Experience
No matter how good your homepage is, customers will bounce if it doesn’t load fast enough. Make the website experience consistent across desktop and mobile.
You can run usability tests and test all pages on mobiles. Look out for things like images adapting to screen size, whether CTA buttons are visible, the text is optimized.
Pro Tip: If you resize images, make sure they’re still good quality. Grainy images aren’t visually appealing and might create a false impression of your brand.
Using the PageSpeed Insights tool, find your trouble spots and work to improve page speed, resize images, and replace broken links.
Calls-To-Action (CTAs)
CTAs create a layer of interactivity. Place them prominently and use a contrasting design from the rest of your page. Less clutter boosts conversions, so have more blank space around CTA buttons.
Related Read: 5 Tips for Implementing and Optimizing Smart CTAs
CTAs define the next steps for your customers, so spend some time getting them right.
It’s not enough to say “Learn More”. It’s better to give directions like “Start Your Free Trial”. But even better is to say, “Start My Free Trial”. Now you’re giving the buyer the power to control their journey.
In your blog articles, you might also consider anchor text CTAs (clickable text in a hyperlink). It’s worth running A/B testing to decide which style of CTA you use.
There are other places you’ll place CTAs. Conversion and pricing pages should focus on the benefits of your solution. They must communicate what the product is, why the customer should buy it, the results they’ll get, and how to purchase it. A call-to-action here starts their journey.
Your Customers are Your Best Marketers
Include user-generated content on your homepage and landing pages.
User-generated content is the real deal. The average conversion rate of visitors who saw User Generated Content (UGC) is 161% higher than those who didn’t. Potential buyers want to know what customers think of your product, and video testimonials are a great way to humanize testimonials and build trust and authority.
It’s worth listing companies you’ve worked with and including case studies for those who want to dig deeper.
Who are You?
Sprinkle in your brand, mission, vision, and values throughout your website. On the homepage, you might highlight that you create tailored solutions for your ideal customers because you’re customer-centric.
On the Lean Labs website, we list core values, one of which is value over profit. Highlighting the core company belief lets ideal customers know that Lean Labs prides itself on providing high-quality work over making a quick buck.
What is your mission? What are your values? Answer those questions and design your website with your answers in mind.
The Benefits of SaaS Website Design Optimization
There are more ways to optimize your SaaS website design, but the ones we’ve listed are a good starting point. So what are the benefits?
- An intuitive flow and relevant content to support the buyer journey increases conversions. Your customers will thank you for making their purchases intuitive and easy.
- A better user experience reinforces positive perceptions of your brand. If the user experience is good from the outset, imagine what you could do to delight them with your product and customer service?
- If visitors find what they need, they’ll return to your site. You’ve built trust.
- With trust comes authority. Customers will spend more time on your website and feel inclined to read articles and watch videos you’ve posted.
Your website design can help build relationships with the people who matter most; your customers.
SaaS Website Design Optimization is Crucial to Your Success
No matter how good your site looks, if it’s not optimized for your customers and doesn’t align with their journey, you face an uphill battle to convert them.
Think about your customer every step of the way when designing your website. What do you want to say to them? Can you build trust by creating helpful content? Once you do, you can collect more information and segment your audience to make their journey more personal.
Most of all, provide an outstanding experience, exceed expectations, and create advocates for your brand.
Partner with Lean Labs. We make it easy to attract, engage, and delight your customers through beautifully designed, growth-driven websites created to convert. Through Sprocket Rocket, you can choose from hundreds of HubSpot website templates and design conversion-worthy websites.
