Log In is more popular than Sign In: The UX Microcopy Survey

Is it Log in, or Sign in? Contact Us, or just Contact? Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, or is Legal alone enough?

Pricing, right? Not Price?

Sentence or title case? Or all caps?

Much like the wording on exit signs and in-flight safety manuals, you don’t want to get too creative with the most crucial bits of text in your app. The easy option would be to follow the crowd and do what’s most popular. But … what is most popular, exactly? Check a handful of apps and you’ll find a variety, Sign In here, Login there, and a dozen variations between.

So I kept checking, went through 100 different SaaS landing pages to see how each one says to join, enter your account, see how much the app costs, get in touch, and more.

Here’s the microcopy your landing page should use.

The most popular SaaS landing page microcopy.

Sign up, then Log in to join and access your account.

Get Started, Sign Up, Start, or Try something for your primary CTA. There’s no consensus here; feel free to be creative.

Put Pricing at domain.com/pricing.

Help Center at help.domain.com or domain.com/help and Contact Us at domain.com/contact.

Terms and Privacy, at domain.com/terms and /privacy, respectively.

Use Sentence case (first letter capitalized, everything else lowercase) for Sign up and Log in, or use Title Case (first letter of every word capitalized) everywhere.

Those are the most popular bits of SaaS landing page microcopy in 2022 (from a survey of 100 SaaS tools in mid-June, 2022). Some are more popular than others; almost everyone uses Pricing, while an equally large number use something random for their primary CTA.

Here’s the breakdown.

Get started

Everyone has a different idea about what’s most likely to get new visitors to sign up. There were 67 different primary CTA texts across 100 apps; no other bit of copy was as varied.

But there were some patterns. Typically, CTAs were actionable phrases, starting with a verb often in a way that ties into what the product offers.

Get started was most popular, as the text 14% of apps used for their CTAs. Another 10% used added free, now, or some other extra to the base Get started, meaning nearly one in four apps used some variation on the actionable phrase.

Sign up was almost as popular, with 23% using the phrase, though almost every site added something to it: free, for AppName, for PRICE, with email, and so on.

Start came in next at 18%, always as a phrase about what you’ll do in the app: Start building, Start your website, Start Selling, Start reading, and more.

Try was used by 11%, again as a phrase: Try AppName, Try for free, Try it now.

And then came the other action phrases. Open your store. Make a doc. Continue with AppName. Give AppName a try.

This is one spot where you might want to experiment with your copy, see what feels right, let your branding shine through. Or, just make it simple and tell people to Get started and on to using your app.

Sign up

A CTA, front and center on your landing page, isn’t enough. You’ll also want somewhere visitors can register for your product, no matter where they are on your site. For that, typically you’ll have a Sign up button in your header, beside your Log in link.

And Sign up is the most popular way to word it, used by 36% of sites, most commonly on its own or paired with free or for free.

Get Started was the next most common, used by 24% of sites, again with free tacked on the end occasionally.

Try was another popular option that sounds less committal, used by 14% of sites, typically paired with free and sometimes with an app name such as Try Xero for free.

Or, tell people to Start paired with a verb, as 11% did: Start writing, Start trial, Start selling, or Start for free. Another similar option is Create, used by 4 sites to tell you to Create an account or something similar.

domain.com/signup was the most popular permalink, used by 45%, with a wide variety of other options including linking to the pricing page, login page, or app sub-domain.

Log in

Once people are ready to use your app, Log in is what they’re most likely to look for. That’s what 48% of apps use, split evenly between sentence and title case.

The slightly archaic Login was used by 13% of sites. That’s likely better used as the permalink—as domain.com/login was used by 57% of sites—but since the word Login is a noun meaning “an act of logging in to a computer,” you’re likely better to use the two-word Log in in your copy.

Sign in is the next most common, used by 35% of sites.

Log out

It’s a toss-up on how to tell people to exit their account. Log out was used by 32 sites, Sign out by 30 (out of the 71 total where I had easy access to an active account to check). The more important thing here is to match how your site says to log in; pair Log in with Log out, Sign in with Sign out, as 81% of sites do for consistency.

Pricing

Here’s the one bit of copy where the crowd overwhelmingly agrees: Your pricing page should be called Pricing, and should live at domain.com/pricing. 72% of sites use Pricing, almost matched by the 68% that use that as the permalink.

Beyond that, variations on Plans & Pricing were used by 5%, Plans were used by 3%, and a handful of others used product-specific names like Go Pro (nope, not the camera) or Go Premium.

Help Center

One I didn’t expect to be so popular was Help Center. I thought the standalone Help or perhaps Docs would be more common.

But nope; Help Center is the most popular way to list your docs and support options, used by 32% of sites. Another 15% used Help on its own.

Support was the next most common, used on its own by 17% of sites, or as Support Center, Get Support, and more by another 10%.

Another surprise: 53% put their docs on a subdomain, most commonly at help.domain.com or support.domain.com. Otherwise, domain.com/help was most common, used by 20% of sites—and generally is where I’d advise putting docs, if possible, for the bit of SEO lift it’d give.

Contact us

Only half of sites made it easy for people to get in touch. But of those, some made it very easy; 7% put their contact email address directly in the footer.

Many others had a contact form, and most commonly used Contact us to link to it (27 out of all hundred sites, or 53% of those that had a contact link). Otherwise, the shorter Contact was also popular (and also most popular as the permalink, where 61% of sites used domain.com/contact for their contact page), as well as the even simpler Email.

Terms

Most websites list both a Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and ask you to accept them when creating an account. But you don’t have to write the whole phrase.

Terms on its own is enough, at least for the 27% of websites that used it (most commonly paired with simply Privacy). It’s even more common as a permalink, with 45 sites using domain.com/terms.

Legal is another shorter alternative, used by 12% of apps—and it’s even more common as a permalink, with domain.com/legal used by 36 of the sites.

The full Terms of Service is the second most common, used by 26% of sites (all but one in Title Case), while variations on Terms and Conditions were used by 10%.

Or, go for an abbreviation, as 3 sites did with TOS or ToC.

Privacy

Short and simple is even more popular for privacy—but don’t get too creative. Your Privacy policy is the one page where there are laws about what you can name it, as California’s CalOPPA privacy rules require all Privacy policies include the word privacy in their link and title.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that Privacy was all 42% of the sites wrote for their privacy link, and 58% used it for their permalink as domain.com/privacy.

Privacy Policy was used by 39%, most commonly paired with the full-length Terms of Service. 20% used domain.com/privacy-policy as their permalink.

Or, you could simplify things and skip the separate privacy page; 13% combined Terms and Privacy on a single page called some variation on Terms & Privacy. Just make sure to include the word Privacy if you need to follow CalOPPA rules.

Capitalization and Consistency

Then, you have to pull it all together.

Keep your case consistent; 65% of sites do, and 81% keep their log in and log out cases consistent. Either is fine; Sentence case has a slight lead for sign in at 46 out of a hundred, while if you include About, Pricing, Contact, and Terms/Privacy, Title case has a slight lead at 31 out of a hundred.

Speaking of consistency, keep your wording consistent, too. If you use Sign in once, use it everywhere. Call Terms the same thing in your sign up screen and in your website footer. It’ll be easier for customers to find—and easier for you to keep up-to-date, too, if you ever decide to change things across your site.

And with the copy decisions out of the way, it’s back to building.

→ Want to dig into the data—or get your app added to the analysis? Get a copy of the full UX Copy library, including screenshots of each site’s landing page, and the permalink for each button or page mentioned.