Website design mistakes are the faults that stop a visitor from understanding what you do, trusting you or getting in touch. Bad website design is rarely a question of taste. The common mistakes that cost enquiries are ordinary ones: tiny fonts, a main menu nobody can follow, a mobile layout nobody checked.
These faults are quiet. Nobody phones to say your contrast is poor or your form is broken. They simply leave, and the only evidence is an inbox that stays empty while the site looks perfectly respectable on the screen where it was approved.
This article names the common design mistakes in the order a visitor meets them, explains why they happen, shows what each one costs, and sets out how to find yours without hiring anyone. It is written for the owner or marketing lead who suspects the site is the problem.
Bad website design is judged by what a visitor can do, not how it looks
A site can be handsome and still be a bad website. Web design that pleases a committee can fail the users who matter, and bad design often hides behind a polished look.
A site can also be plain and work well. The test is not whether people admire it. The test is whether a stranger can read it, find their way, believe it and act on it, without help.
Time is short. Nielsen Norman Group, a usability research firm, reports that users often leave web pages in 10 to 20 seconds, and that a clear value proposition communicated within 10 seconds can hold attention for much longer.
That ten seconds is the real brief. Users form an impression of your business in those first seconds, and every mistake below is a way of wasting them.
Think of a good website as one that clears four hurdles in sequence: it can be read, it can be navigated, it can be trusted, and it can be acted on. Good web design clears all four. Bad design fails at one of them, and the overall design then works against you.
If you want the wider picture of what a good B2B site is for, the ultimate guide to B2B website design covers the whole job. Here the focus is what goes wrong.
Common design mistakes make a page hard to read first
A visitor cannot judge your offer if they cannot comfortably read it. These common mistakes make text unreadable, and every one is cheap to correct.
Poor contrast. Pale grey text on white, or white text laid over a busy photograph, is the classic. Low contrast looks refined in a mock-up and is unreadable in daylight on a phone.
Bad contrast makes text unreadable for low-vision users and tiring for everyone else.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG 2.2, set a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text at Level AA, with 3:1 allowed for large text. A free contrast checker will test yours in a minute.
Clashing colour combinations and low quality images. Colour combinations should help people move through the page, not distract them from it. Blurred, stretched or stock-looking pictures make a site feel cheap before a word is read.
Body text that is too small. Tiny fonts are the commonest reading fault. A fixed font size that suits a designer’s large monitor fails on a laptop in a meeting room, and tiny details such as footnotes and form labels suffer first.
Nielsen Norman Group lists fixed font size among its long-running top mistakes in web design, because the fixed size is usually tiny and stops people resizing it.
Too many different fonts. Three or four typefaces, each in several weights, make a page feel noisy and unsure of itself. One font family for headings and one for body text is enough for almost any business.
A wall of text. Long, unbroken paragraphs are skipped. The same Nielsen Norman Group list names non-scannable text as a mistake, and the cure is simple: short paragraphs, clear main headings, and the main point first.
No white space. Cramming every panel, badge and announcement above the fold leaves the eye nowhere to rest. White space, also called empty space, is not wasted room. It is what lets the important elements stand out from the rest. A cluttered layout distracts users and lowers engagement.
Centred text. A line or two centred in a hero is fine. Whole paragraphs of centred text are harder to read than left aligned text, because the eye has no fixed edge on the left side to return to.
Each of these adds to poor usability and a poor user experience, even when it looks minor alone.
Confusing navigation hides the pages that earn enquiries
Once a visitor can read the page, they try to find their way. Confusing navigation is one of the most damaging website design mistakes, because the pages that earn enquiries are usually the ones buried deepest.
Look at your main menu. Overloaded menus confuse visitors, so it should hold a handful of descriptive labels that a stranger would understand, in the words they would use, not yours. For example, “Solutions” and “Approach” mean little to someone arriving cold. “Services”, “Work” and “Contact” mean something.
Hard to find navigation, such as a menu hidden behind an unlabelled icon on a desktop screen, is poor navigation in its plainest form.
Nielsen Norman Group’s list also flags violating design conventions and bad search. People expect the logo to link home and the menu to sit at the top. They expect a search bar, where a site is large, to forgive typos and plurals.
Clever departures from these habits cost you attention rather than earning admiration. A government website can get away with an odd layout because people have to use it. A business site cannot.
Weak information hierarchy is the quieter version. When every item on a page is shouted at the same volume, the visitor cannot tell which matters. Put the important content first, decide the one thing each key page exists to do, and let everything else support it.
The key pages are few: the homepage, the service pages, the proof pages and the contact page. If a visitor cannot reach any of them in two clicks from anywhere on the site, the navigation is costing you.
Check that the links to other pages work and that the menu is the same on every page.
Broken elements, slow loading and an outdated look make visitors doubt you
A visitor who can read and navigate then asks a quieter question: can I trust this business? Small signals answer it, and bad design sends the wrong ones.
Broken elements. A dead link, a missing image, forms that return an error or a button that does nothing. Each one tells the visitor that nobody is looking after the site, and by extension the business.
No SSL certificate. When a browser labels a site “not secure”, people stop, especially before they type their details into a form. An SSL certificate is a basic expectation, and most hosts provide one at no extra charge.
Pop ups that block the page. A pop up that appears the instant someone lands, covers the content and is hard to close is one of the fastest ways to lose a visitor. If you use one, delay it, make it easy to dismiss, and keep it out of the way on phones.
Slow loading. Slow load times come from heavy images and unneeded scripts. Compress images, drop what you do not use, and test the key pages on an ordinary mobile connection, not your office network.
Google states that Core Web Vitals, its loading and responsiveness measures, are used by its ranking systems, so speed is a search matter as well as a visitor one.
Slow loading times lead to higher bounce rates, because people can only tolerate adverse conditions on a website for so long before abandoning it. Google’s web.dev guidance on why speed matters reports that The Economic Times achieved a 43% better bounce rate after passing the Core Web Vitals thresholds.
Inconsistent branding. When fonts, colours and tone change from one page to the next, the site feels stitched together and trust drops.
A time capsule. A copyright line from three years ago, a news section whose last post is older, a team page with people who left. Visitors read a site like this as a sign the business has stopped moving. If you cannot keep a section current, remove it.
A missing next step leaves interested visitors with nowhere to go
A visitor who has read, found their way and believed you still needs to know what to do. Every important page needs one obvious next step, and many sites offer none, or offer six.
The button should contrast with the layout so it stands out, and its label should say the action: “Book a call” or “Send an enquiry”, not “Submit”. Weak calls to action are among the most common design mistakes, and one of the cheapest to fix.
Ground Truth, weekly
Poor mobile responsiveness loses the visitors who arrive on a phone
Most visitors meet your site first on mobile devices, usually a phone. StatCounter puts mobile at 58.99 per cent of worldwide web traffic in September 2026, against 39.26 per cent for desktop, so a non-responsive design can turn away more than half of the audience.
A site where mobile responsiveness was an afterthought quietly fails these mobile users.
The usual signs are a mobile layout that only shrinks the desktop page, buttons too close together to tap, text that needs pinching, and menus that open off the screen. Small screens punish every fault above: poor contrast, long paragraphs and slow loading hurt more there.
Mobile friendliness is more than a page that loads.
Responsive design, where the layout adapts to different screen sizes, is the starting point. A mobile friendly site is one where the headline, the proof and the contact button all work with a thumb. Test the layout on at least one phone and one tablet before you call it done.
Search engines care too. Google says it uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking and recommends responsive web design as the easiest pattern to maintain.
Brandesis designed the Khwai Expeditions Camp website at desktop, tablet and mobile widths for all eleven pages before build began, 33 screens in all, so the small screen is a decision and not a consequence. That is the standard worth asking of anyone building your site.
Accessibility problems turn away people you never see
Accessibility problems are bad design that most owners never notice, because the people affected simply leave. They include images without alt text, so a screen reader announces nothing; links that say only “click here”; forms with no labels; and pages that cannot be used without a mouse.
Websites should aim to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA, a widely used accessibility standard. Semantic headings help here: the W3C notes that headings communicate the organisation of a page and let assistive technologies provide in-page navigation. Accessible sites are easier for all users to navigate.
Many of these overlap with the faults above. Higher contrast helps everyone in bright light. Descriptive link text helps search engines as well as screen readers. Alt text describes an image for those who cannot see it and gives search engines something to read.
Bad design usually comes from a missing decision, not missing skill
Most of these mistakes are not the web designer’s fault. They grow from three situations.
The first is that nobody decided what the site must do. When the owner, the sales lead and the designer each hold a different idea of the job, the page tries to serve all of them and serves none well.
The second is that the site was approved by people who already know the business. They fill in what is missing without noticing. A stranger cannot.
The third is that nobody owns the site after launch. Links break, content ages and plugins fall behind, and no one is responsible for noticing. A website is not finished at launch. It needs a named person and a routine.
None of this needs a new brand to fix. A good company can run a bad website simply because the site belongs to nobody. It needs a decision about the site’s one job and a person who checks it. The website design checklist sets out what to decide before any build.
Each of these mistakes costs enquiries in a different way
The cost of bad design is not one number. High bounce rates, where people leave after one page, usually point to a site that looks confusing or untrustworthy. Each fault removes enquiries at a different point in the visit, which is why the largest leak is worth finding before you spend on anything else.
| Mistake | What the visitor does | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Poor contrast, small text | Squints, then leaves | Visitors who never read your offer |
| Confusing navigation | Cannot find the service page | Interest that never reaches a page that sells |
| Broken forms and links | Tries once, gives up | Enquiries you did not know you lost |
| No proof, outdated content | Doubts you are still trading | Trust, so no message is sent |
| Poor mobile layout | Cannot tap the contact button | Every visitor on a phone |
An illustration, not a measurement: if 500 people visit in a month and 10 send an enquiry, your conversion rate is 2 per cent. Remove one fault that was blocking a tenth of the remaining visitors and you gain enquiries without paying for a single extra visit.
The Brand Library entry on website design explains how design, content and structure work together, and what makes a good website describes the opposite case.
Fixing the right design mistake first changes more than a redesign does
When the inbox is quiet, the instinct is to redesign. That is sometimes right and often premature. A redesign that carries the same missing decision, the same buried contact page and the same unchecked phone layout into a new site pays for new colours and keeps the leak.
Fix in the order a visitor meets the problems. Make the page readable, make the path obvious, repair what is broken, add proof near each claim, and check it on a phone.
Good design makes the next step obvious. Each change is small, improves the experience for everyone, and is visible in the next month’s enquiries.
If, after those fixes, the structure itself is wrong, a rebuild is the honest answer. Should you redesign your website sets out how to tell.
For the reader who wants the whole job done properly, Brandesis, a Brand Growth Agency, builds sites on a decided position through its website design service. The weekly Ground Truth newsletter sends one practical lesson every Wednesday.
You can find your own website design mistakes with five checks and no developer
You do not need an audit to see where your site is weakest. Run these five checks, ideally watching a stranger do the first.
- Ask someone outside the business to look at the homepage for ten seconds, then say what you do and who it is for. If they cannot, fix the opening screen first.
- Ask them to find your contact page from the homepage. Count the clicks.
- Open the site on a phone on mobile data. Read it, tap the menu and press the contact button.
- Submit your own form and confirm the message arrives. Click every link in the main menu and footer.
- Look at the dates. Anything old, dead or abandoned is either updated this week or deleted.
Usability testing sounds heavy, but five people and a list of tasks will show you most of the problems. Write down every point where the person hesitated. Those hesitations, not your own taste, are the repair list.
FAQ
What makes a poorly designed website?
A website design is poor when it stops people from reading, finding, trusting or acting. Common causes are poor contrast, small text, confusing navigation, broken elements, a weak mobile layout and no clear next step. Ugliness is not the test; failing the visitor is.
What are the most common website design mistakes?
The ones that recur most are unreadable text, a confusing main menu, no clear purpose on the homepage, broken links and forms, slow loading, a poor phone layout, and content that has gone stale. Nielsen Norman Group has compiled lists of the worst web design mistakes for years.
How do I know if my website design is costing me enquiries?
Look at the gap between visits and enquiries in your analytics, then run the five checks above. If strangers cannot say what you do within ten seconds, cannot find the contact page, or cannot use the site on a phone, the design is costing you enquiries.
Do I need a full redesign to fix bad website design?
Not usually. Many mistakes can be fixed in place: contrast, copy, navigation labels, broken forms and the mobile layout. A redesign is worth considering when the structure itself is wrong or the site cannot be updated, not because the colours look dated.
Can bad website design affect search engines?
Yes, indirectly. Google uses the mobile version of your content for ranking and uses Core Web Vitals in its ranking systems, so a slow or poor mobile layout gives search engines and visitors less to work with. Google also says no single signal decides page experience.