One of the biggest factors in a website’s success is its design. The look and feel create a first impression and build trust in your brand. But design isn’t just about how a site looks. It covers the visual side (layout, colour, images, fonts, icons) and the technical side (speed and how the site actually works).
A good website has to look good and function well. That takes a real mix of skill, and it’s where less experienced designers tend to slip up. The most common website design mistakes are small ones that pile up and quietly drag the site down.
10 Web Design Mistakes to Avoid
Here are ten common website design mistakes, and what to do instead.
1. Designing for Yourself Instead of Your Audience
The most common website design mistake is designing the site you want, not the site your customers need. Your homepage isn’t a gallery of your taste. It’s a tool that has to work for the people landing on it.
What to do instead: Pull your analytics before you pick a colour or a font. Look at what devices your audience actually uses, what pages they spend time on, and where they drop off. If most of your traffic is on phones, the design has to work hard on a small screen, not just on a designer’s monitor.
2. Skipping the Colour Palette
A lot of sites are designed colour by colour, page by page. Someone picks a blue here, a slightly different blue there, and within six months, the site looks like five different sites stitched together.
What to do instead: Lock down your full palette before any page gets designed. Primary brand colours, secondary colours for accents and UI, neutrals for backgrounds and text. Then test every colour across devices and screens. A grey that looks soft on a designer’s monitor can look washed out on a cheap office screen. Build the palette once, use it everywhere.
3. Using Poor Quality Images
Pixelated hero images. Blurry product shots. Stretched photos with weird proportions. Nothing kills credibility faster than an image that looks like it was pulled off a phone screenshot in 2014.
What to do instead: Use high-resolution images at one-to-one scaling so nothing gets distorted. If you’re using big hero images, they need to earn their space. Average images at full width just emphasise how average they are. And before you upload anything, compress it. A 4MB hero image will tank your page speed even if it looks gorgeous.
4. Cramming Too Much Above the Fold
There’s an old idea that everything important has to live above the fold. So designers cram in a hero, a value prop, three feature blocks, a video, a testimonial slider, and a newsletter signup. The result is noise.
What to do instead: Pick one thing the visitor needs to see first. One. That’s the headline. Everything else can wait a scroll. Modern users scroll without thinking, so the question isn’t “what fits above the fold”, it’s “what’s the one thing they need to grasp before they decide whether to keep going”.
5. Inconsistent Design Across Pages
A formal corporate homepage, a playful services page, a contact page that looks like it was built by a different agency in a different decade. This happens more than it should, usually because pages got added over the years without anyone tending the system.
What to do instead: Build a design system, not just a homepage. Decide on heading hierarchy, button styles, spacing rules, image treatments, and how colour gets used. Then enforce it across every page. If your contact page and your homepage feel like the same brand, you’re doing it right.
6. Weak or Hidden Calls to Action
A CTA that says “Submit” or “Learn More” or “Click Here” isn’t telling anyone anything. Neither is a button styled to blend politely into the background. If a visitor has to hunt for the next step, most won’t bother.
What to do instead: Use a command verb that names the action. “Book a consultation” beats “Get in touch”. “Download the guide” beats “Available now”. Then make the button impossible to miss. Bold colour, generous padding, placed where the eye naturally lands. One primary CTA per page section, not five competing buttons.
7. Not Building Responsive From Day One
Responsive design isn’t a feature anymore. It’s the baseline. Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, so a site that doesn’t work properly on phones is fighting the algorithm. Your audience is almost certainly using a mix of phones, tablets and laptops to find you. Responsive means one website that adapts its layout to whatever screen it’s on, rather than a desktop site bolted to a separate mobile version.
What to do instead: Build responsive from the first wireframe. Test your designs on a phone before you sign them off, not after. A layout that looks balanced on a 27-inch monitor can fall apart on a 380px screen, and the time to catch that is during design, not after launch. You only build and maintain one site, which saves money and keeps the experience consistent for every visitor.
8. Ignoring Page Speed
A slow site loses visitors before they’ve seen anything. According to Google, the probability of a mobile user bouncing increases 32% when page load time goes from one second to three. By five seconds, it’s 90%.
What to do instead: Treat speed as a design constraint, not a developer problem to fix at the end. Every design decision has a speed cost. A 4MB hero image. A homepage with six embedded videos. Twelve different webfonts. Animations on every section. Each one looks good in isolation. Together, they make a site that crawls. Pick the visual elements that earn their weight. Compress images before they go anywhere near the build. Limit fonts to two or three. If a design choice is going to slow the page down, decide whether the visual payoff is worth the cost. Usually it isn’t.
9. Sloppy Typography
Kerning is the space between individual letters. Tracking is the space across a block of text. Leading is the space between lines. Most people never notice these details when they’re right. Everyone feels them when they’re wrong, even if they can’t name what’s bothering them.
What to do instead: Pick two typefaces, maximum. One for headings, one for body. Set your line height around 1.5 for body text so paragraphs breathe. Keep body copy between 16 and 18px on desktop, never smaller. Test how it actually reads on a phone, not just on a designer’s 27-inch monitor.
10. Not Enough White Space
White space isn’t empty space. It’s the design element that makes everything else readable. Cramped layouts feel cheap and stressful. Generous layouts feel considered and calm.
What to do instead: Add space, then add a bit more. Around headings, between sections, inside buttons, around images. White space lets the eye rest and tells the visitor what matters. If a section feels too sparse, that usually means it’s close to right.
What These Website Design Mistakes Have in Common
Every one of these comes from the same root. Design is treated as decoration instead of as a job. Good website design is about making decisions that serve a specific audience, doing specific things. Colour, type, space, speed, hierarchy. These aren’t aesthetic preferences. They’re the mechanics of whether your site works.
If your site is making three or four of these website design mistakes, you’re losing visitors you don’t have to lose. It’s worth getting another set of eyes on it. Most of these are fixable without a full rebuild. Some need a designer with a clear strategy and a willingness to cut things.
We’ve spent 25 years rebuilding sites that started fine and slowly stopped working. When you’re ready to talk through what your site needs, get in touch. You can also see how we approach website design and UX from the start.
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