We Studied 100 SaaS Sites To Uncover Design Trends + Best Practices (Here’s What We Found)

Across all of these sites there was very little consistency in where the call to action was placed. Some of them were placed in the far left of the web page, some were drop dead in the middle and others were far off to the right. The best practice when it comes to placement of the CTA seems to be a complete coin flip amongst SaaS companies. 

When analyzing the various call to actions there was a clear trend towards green and orange buttons. 

It’s not common to see a site that has a black background in SaaS

Most of the sites (92% of them) used white or light colors as the primary background for their sites.

The rise of live chat and conversational marketing has been a fascinating trend to watch. As this idea of embracing real-time conversations with prospects (or using bots) continues to catch traction it’s clearly becoming popular amongst B2B SaaS companies. 

Our research found that nearly 50% of SaaS sites have a chat box in the corner ready to be engaged with. Across most of these sites, the services being used were Intercom or Drift.

Here’s a list of things to do if you want a site that isn’t like everyone else: 

• Don’t use flat illustration as an abstract representation of your brand 
• Don’t use dark orange or yellow buttons on your homepage 
• Don’t left align your value proposition on the site 
• Place your logo in the middle or on the right 
• Use a dark background for your site 

The placement of the logo on the top left of a website is a common design best practice. It’s an approach that most designers leverage inside of SaaS and outside of SaaS. It’s a logical choice recognizing that most people in North America view a site from left to right.

Responsive sites are a great way to ensure you don’t deliver broken experiences for people on a desktop or visiting on mobile.

The rise of custom illustrations have swept the SaaS community by storm. It’s something that for the last 3 years has been popping up on site after site after site. Our professional opinion is that this is a trend but it’s only a few percentage points off from becoming a best practice.

The sites we reviewed that have a call to action typically have a clear thing that they want people to do. The majority of them use action-oriented language (%%) and push the visitor to do something that pushes them further in the funnel. Some variations include:

• Schedule A Demo
• Request A Demo
• Get A Free Demo
• Get X For Free
• Get Started
• Try X