How To Budget For Your Next B2B SaaS Website

Budgeting for your next B2B SaaS website can be intimidating. We get it, this is a big decision and there are many moving parts to consider. But don’t worry; we’re here to help you make sense of the numbers and figure out how to create a brief, and what elements make a difference, to meet your needs.

Follow these three steps and you’ll be well on your way to a successful launch.

• Decide what type of site will best suit your needs
• Create an estimate based on the information you’ve gathered from Step 1
• Include any other costs that may come up when designing or developing the site, such as copywriting, graphic design, hosting fees, etc.

What is the purpose of your website?

Your core purpose of your B2B SaaS website is likely to be lead generation. These may come in the form of free trial leads or booked demos for your sales teams; however, it could also be increasing SEO rankings.

For enterprise SaaS, companies may need more of a brochure website for prospects who might need more information before making a purchase decision, or for outbound sales to link out too.

Does your brand need an update?

Many SaaS products are looking to make an impression on others with their logo and branding. But is your company’s visual identity outdated? Is it time for a change?

Should a new logo and visual identity be part of this project?

What should go in your website strategy?

A B2B SaaS website strategy is focused on insight, analysis and the master plan for working out how to get where you want to be, ensuring a website that is perfectly aligned to your business is created.

Key things to define in your strategy are:

• The buyer personas and user journeys you want each visitor to take through the website. The user journey should map how each buyer persona interacts at every step along the way: from initial search queries all the way through to the conversion. This process creates a tailored experience that keeps them coming back again and again!
• Your call to actions (CTAs) and how these link with buyer journeys
• The website site map – see next section
• Design inspiration
• Graphics style
• Content

Create your site map

Start with listing all the pages you want in your new website. Typical sections on a SaaS website are:

• Home
• Features
• Pricing
• CTA – book demo, free trial
• About
• Resources, like white papers, case studies
• A blog

Other sections to consider are use cases, solution pages and career sections.

Is new or updated content part of the project?

Are you happy with the content on your current site (assuming you have a site already), or do you need new content?

What tone of voice should your website take? And what do you need to differentiate yourself from the competition and stay on top?

Ensure messages work on a website – they should be short, snappy and easy enough for the reader to skim through.

Unicorn can write content for your new website. This could start from a brand perspective and create completely new messaging, down to just copy-editing content you provide.

Find design inspiration

What websites do you like, or not like? Typically, these will be websites of your competitors however it’s worth looking further afield starting with other SaaS websites and then consider any website.

You may find a website that’s perfect or a couple of websites to base your design on. Take inspiration from other sites, both big and small by collecting images together on a mood board. Think of elements like headers, footers, graphics and fonts you like.

More creative designs are likely to need a bigger budget than something conventional.

What kind of graphics do you want?

Graphics can really bring a website to life. SaaS websites typically have a mixture of screenshots (sometimes stylised screenshots), stock photos and custom graphics or illustrations.

You need to decide what’s best for your website, many leading websites use an assortment of all these elements in the same graphic.

Stock photos are a cheaper option, but they often don’t have the same level of quality as custom graphics. Screenshots can be stylised to make them more interesting and engaging for readers.

Stock photos and using screenshots from your product will be the cheapest option. However custom graphics and illustrations will really bring your website to life.

Work out your build requirements

For those of you who don’t want to spend too much, Wix and Squarespace are good choices for building a website. You’re limited with templates but if that doesn’t bother you these builders may be perfect! Builders typically have excess code which can make your site difficult to optimise for SEO, so this is something worth looking into before committing one way or the other.

We build all our B2B SaaS websites, using custom builds on WordPress. This way you get the power of the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world, and we can customise your website exactly how you want it with a platform as powerful as WordPress.

Things that will have an impact on the budget are:

• Your overall theme
• How many templates you require
• How many pages you need
• Do you need any custom functionality? For example, an ROI calculator?
• Do you just want it in one language, or one country? Or options for multiple countries and languages.

What will help with SEO?

Key SEO tasks for a new website are:

• You ensure that your site is SEO-friendly by doing detailed keyword research and writing appropriate meta titles descriptions. You will also want to have the right headings on each page of content, which makes it easier for search engine crawlers to find what they are looking for when indexing a website
• If you have a website that has been around for awhile it’s important to plan the migration carefully. One thing that is very important when migrating from one website to another is ensuring redirects are set up properly, so any SEO juice doesn’t get lost during the switchover process
• A technical audit of the site
• Any website should be built to best practice like following Google’s core web vitals

Building a website to SEO best practice and ensuring a smooth migration should be standard with any new website, but don’t make assumptions and check. You may want to provide your own keyword research and maybe even meta titles and descriptions. Or an agency can create these for you as part of the project.

Ongoing maintenance and continuous improvement

Once a website is launched, it should not be the end of your journey to create that site. Maintenance tasks like updating WordPress functionality and plugins at least monthly will ensure your site stays up-to-date with all new features.

Continuous improvement takes us to conversion rate optimisation. See this blog post for information on that.

Where will you host your website?

The final consideration is where you host your website. We would recommend WP Engine for WordPress websites. Your website will be backed up daily and have strong security that protects against DDoS attacks as well as a staging server for any developments before they are live – all at an affordable price!

Start with a brief

The best SaaS website briefs include answers for all the above. You may have this down to the last detail or just know you need a new website and want an agency to create the brief for you, based on their experience.

Either way the brief needs to be spec’d at first to be able to quote for your new website.

So, what should you budget for a SaaS website?

The key considerations are:

• How big is the website? The number, and complexity of templates can be a bigger factor here than number of pages
• Do you just need a design and build or do you need a new logo, content and a site migration?
• What functionality do you require?

Websites from Unicorn start at around £10,000 and whilst there is no limit, they typically go up to about £50,000.

Get a new SaaS website from Unicorn

We’ve been creating websites for SaaS companies since 2009 so know what triggers to pull to get leads coming in. If you require a new website or help to improve your website conversion rate get in touch and request a free consultation.