Web design matters. You can have the best products in the world but if your website looks a state or takes too long to load, your customers won’t hang around long enough to check out what you have to offer.
In this article, I'm sharing eight classic web design disasters that will leave you at best mildly amused and at worst recoiling in horror.
1. More is rarely more
Some websites look like they've been designed by a hyperactive toddler after smashing through 20 bags of Haribo. Every inch of the screen is crammed with visuals and text, leaving visitors feeling like they're being yelled at through the screen.
Take this Norwegian site for example, and its incredible vast array of ‘stuff’. The designer has thrown EVERYTHING but the kitchen sink on here (although that may be on here too, I’ll check after I’ve recovered from this INSANE sensory overload).
Got to confess, I am quite intrigued by the ‘Willy el-Jeep med Gummihjul’. Touché, Arngren.net!
2. Ignore site speed at your peril
Some websites load so slowly you could boil a kettle, drink a cup of tea, wash up the mug and still be staring at a loading icon. OK, this may be a *slight* exaggeration, but in an age of instant gratification, a slow website is digital suicide. Anything over three seconds, as this graph from Backlinko shows, and you can wave goodbye to your audience.
The main culprits? Unoptimised images that are >1 MB, unnecessary plugins and excessive code bloat. Remember: every second your site takes to load is another opportunity for visitors to jump ship. Compress those images, folks!
3. Quirky or inappropriate typeface is not font-tastic
"Oh look, this medieval typeface will be perfect for my accountancy firm's website!"… said no successful business owner ever.
We all know about the curse of Comic Sans but there are other ‘fun’ fonts that should be well avoided by any business other than a nursery or village fete organiser (yes, I’m looking at you Curlz MT!).
Getting font right is a tricky business – you want to have an eye-catching style that not only makes your brand stand out and resonate with your audience but also appears professional and clear.
Some businesses go crazy with their chosen typeface/s, while others just can’t be arsed, as this next example shows:
Now, I don’t know about you, but this site for a massage therapist doesn’t exactly inspire me to make a booking (even if they do ‘offer buttocks’). It’s not inviting, engaging or elegant, it’s just badly formatted bland text.
To be fair, it could be worse. If you’re going to go fancy, try not to end up inadvertently calling your favourite aunt a rude name on her birthday:
4. Choosing colour combinations from the ninth circle of hell
Pink text on a bright green background might seem like a splendid idea after your third espresso martini, but it's the visual equivalent of nails down a blackboard.
There’s a science behind colour choices – clever boffins have put in the legwork (sorry, eyework) to explain what certain colours signify, as explained by Vistaprint below:
But some websites are happy to laugh in the face of such research and just go completely maverick, as the following two examples demonstrate:
Anyone want to hazard a guess at what the main body of text says on that bottom one? Anybody?
According to WebAIM which looks at the web accessibility of one million homepages, the most common fail is ‘low contrast text’. Clearly our friends in the examples above would've been on that list. To make sure you're not, try using a tool like Audioeye to check how accessible your designs and pages are.
Anyway, I’m going to pause for a moment and give my retinas a chance to recover.
5. Excessive pop-ups
I hate pop-ups. They remind me of wasps hovering around me in a beer garden when I’m trying to enjoy my drink in peace.
Immediately ambushing visitors with pop-ups before they've even had a chance to explore your website always feels to me like a strange marketing ploy. It's like walking into a shop and having someone demand your email address before you've even looked at a single product.
Sadly, it’s become the norm for most e-comm businesses to do this. One of the absolute worst offenders is Temu. In order to buy that hilarious novelty cat umbrella for 75p, you have to navigate your way through one annoying pop up after another.
I highly doubt Temu gives a toss though, because, well – it’s Temu.
But for smaller businesses, it’s wise to think of the user experience here. Your customers will have already had to click away the Cookie pop-up and while offering an incentive is never a bad thing, there are better ways to do it, such as placing a nice, non-invasive banner at the top of the screen:
6. Forgetting about mobile
It's 2025 and somehow there are still online businesses who haven't got to grips with responsive designs. Anything that involves squinting, pinching and zooming is just a massive no-no. Considering Google has a mobile-first approach to indexing and ranking, it seems madness that so many websites still look like this on a mobile screen:
Oh my eyes!!!
OK, so maybe, just maybe, sites that feature predominantly informational content like the one above can get away with a duff aesthetic, but it still looks horribly unprofessional, dated and a bit naff. If you’re an e-commerce site though…put it this way, I would be hotfooting it over to a competitor site before my eyeballs melted.
7. The Great Wall of Text
Some websites bombards users with massive blocks of unbroken text that would make even the most dedicated literature professor wince. And while the whole eight second attention span theory has been debunked, most people still prefer to get the info they need straight away, without wading through chunky paragraph after paragraph.
Your website needs to give its visitors visual breathing room. Use headings, clear CTAs, short paragraphs and bullet points before users develop repetitive strain injury from excessive scrolling.
In terms of the example below, just think how much this chunk of text could benefit from being split into two, or even three, paragraphs:
8. Stock photo / AI absurdity
Picture the scene. You’re a three-man plumbing firm based on an industrial estate just off Junction 6 on the M40. Yet your website banner image shows a swish boardroom filled with impossibly beautiful people in well-fitted suits smiling inanely at a whiteboard. Worse still, one of the beautiful people appears to have three extra fingers on their right hand.
The disconnect between these cheesy corporate stock images (like the one below) or AI-generated abominations and the actual services being offered creates a credibility gap. Invest in real, authentic images that shows the customer who you are and what you offer.
Looking for an agency who gets web design oh so right?
Web design isn't rocket science, but it’s easy to get it wrong, especially if you don’t have the end user in mind. The best websites typically aren’t the most flamboyant or technically impressive – they’re the ones that bring customers to your site and keep them there.
Adido’s web design team have decades of experience designing great websites and building them to last using PHP, MODX and Laravel. If you’re looking to refresh your website, get in touch with the experts today!
