The worst website designs on the internet are fun to laugh at, until you realize your own site might be making the same mistakes. A cluttered homepage, a hidden phone number or a menu nobody can find doesn’t just look bad. It quietly sends customers to a competitor before they ever call. Below are 10 real and typical examples of bad website design, what each one gets wrong, and the quick fix a small business can apply today. You’ll also find a 2026 checklist covering the newer mistakes, like slow mobile pages, that cost local businesses the most leads.
What Makes a Website Design Bad?
A bad website design is one that makes visitors work too hard to understand what a business does or how to contact it. The most common problems are clutter, confusing navigation, weak calls to action, poor images and slow mobile pages. Looks matter, but the real test is whether a visitor can find what they need within seconds.
First impressions form fast, and design shapes trust. In Stanford’s 2002 Web Credibility study, 46.1% of consumers’ comments about whether a site seemed credible referred to its visual design, including layout, typography and color. That makes design a credibility signal, not just decoration.
Here’s a quick look at the most common mistakes and how to fix them:
| Design mistake | What visitors experience | Quick fix |
| Too busy | Can’t tell what the business does | One headline and one main action per page |
| Hidden navigation | Leaves to find information elsewhere | 5 to 6 clear menu items |
| Weak call to action | Doesn’t know what to do next | One visible button: Call, Book or Get a Quote |
| No contact information | Can’t reach you | Phone and address in the header and footer |
| Slow or broken on mobile | Leaves before the page loads | Compress images and test on a phone |
10 of the Worst Website Designs and What Each One Teaches
The examples below include well-known sites that designers often cite as cautionary tales, plus the patterns we see most often on small business websites. Each one ends with a fix you can apply to your own site.
1. Too Busy: Ling’s Cars
Ling’s Cars, a UK car leasing company, is one of the most famous examples of a cluttered website. The homepage stacks promotional banners, repeated menus and a long grid of brand links, long known for bright colors and animated graphics.
It may suit a brand built on personality, but most small businesses can’t afford that much noise. Visitors who need to understand your services in a few seconds will leave instead.
Fix it: Give every page one clear headline, one main message and one primary button. Move everything else lower down or onto its own page.
2. No Visual Hierarchy: Arngren.net
Arngren, a Norwegian electronics and gadget retailer, is often cited as one of the worst website designs online. Products, prices and text links are packed edge to edge, with nothing telling the eye where to look first.
Visual hierarchy is how a page guides visitors through size, spacing and contrast. Without it, every item competes for attention, so nothing gets noticed.
Fix it: Make your most important element the biggest, use spacing to separate sections, and limit each page to two or three font sizes.
3. Navigation That Hides Everything: Pacific Northwest X-Ray
Pacific Northwest X-Ray’s website is a long-running example of confusing navigation. Columns of text links in different colors compete for attention, and a first-time visitor has no clear menu or search to follow.
When people can’t find services, pricing or contact details in a few clicks, they assume the information doesn’t exist.
Fix it: Keep your main menu to five or six items, label them plainly (Services, About, Reviews, Contact), and add a search bar if your site has more than 20 pages.
4. Clashing Styles and the Wrong Audience: Yale School of Art
The Yale School of Art website is a deliberate experiment: an editable wiki where members of the school community can change most pages. The result is a raw, unconventional look that suits an art school testing ideas.
The same approach would confuse customers looking for a dentist or an electrician. Design should match the audience you serve. Mixed fonts, clashing colors and inconsistent page styles signal a weak brand to most buyers.
Fix it: Pick one logo, one or two typefaces and a small color palette, and use them on every page. Then ask whether the overall tone fits the customers you want.
5. Not Busy Enough: The Empty Homepage
The opposite problem is just as common on small business sites. A homepage with a big photo, a vague tagline like “Excellence in Everything” and nothing else leaves visitors guessing what the company actually sells.
Minimal design can work well, but only when the essential information is still there.
Fix it: Make sure your homepage says what you do, who you serve and where you operate, all above the fold.
6. A Terrible Call to Action
A weak call to action hides the next step. Common versions include a tiny “Submit” button at the bottom of a long page, a contact form asking for 12 fields, or three competing buttons that each say something different.
Fix it: Choose one main action per page, use clear wording like “Get a Free Quote” or “Call Now,” and keep forms to name, phone or email, and a short message. Our landing page tips cover this in more detail.
7. Walls of Text and No Whitespace
Long, unbroken paragraphs are one of the fastest ways to lose a reader. Most visitors scan a page before deciding whether to read it, and dense text gives them nothing to scan.
Fix it: Keep paragraphs to two or three lines, use subheadings every few paragraphs, add bullet points for lists, and leave enough whitespace around each section.
8. Ugly or Irrelevant Photos
Blurry images, stretched logos and generic stock photos of people shaking hands make a business look careless. Irrelevant images are almost as bad, because they tell visitors nothing about your work.
Fix it: Use sharp, real photos of your team, location and completed jobs. Compress them before uploading so they don’t slow the page down.
9. No Contact Information
It sounds obvious, but many small business sites hide their phone number on a single contact page or leave it out entirely. If a ready-to-buy visitor can’t reach you in one tap, they’ll call the next result.
Fix it: Put your phone number in the header, add a clickable call button on mobile, and include your address and hours in the footer of every page.
10. Pop-Ups and Ads That Get in the Way
Full-screen pop-ups that appear the moment a page loads, flashing banners and close buttons that are hard to find all push visitors away. On mobile, an intrusive pop-up can cover the entire page.
Fix it: If you use a pop-up, delay it until the visitor has scrolled or spent some time on the page, make it small, and give it an obvious close button.
Website Design Mistakes That Cost Small Businesses Leads in 2026
The most expensive website design mistakes in 2026 are the ones visitors feel on their phones: slow load times, layouts that break on small screens, no tap-to-call button, long forms and low-contrast text. These problems rarely look dramatic in a screenshot, but they lose more leads than an ugly color scheme.
Speed is the biggest one. Google’s DoubleClick research, published in 2016, found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load. Oversized images and too many plugins are the usual causes on small business sites.
A few other modern mistakes to watch for:
- Desktop-first layouts with text that’s too small or buttons too close together on a phone
- No click-to-call button, forcing mobile visitors to copy and paste your number
- Low-contrast text, like light gray on white, which is hard to read and fails basic accessibility checks
- Forms that ask too much before a visitor has decided to trust you
These issues affect more than first impressions. A slow, frustrating site also hurts how long people stay and whether they come back, which is why website design affects customer retention as much as it affects first visits.
How to Check Your Own Website in 15 Minutes
You can audit your own site for the worst design mistakes in about 15 minutes. Open it on your phone, time how long it takes to load, and check whether a stranger could tell what you do, where you work and how to contact you without scrolling. Any “no” is your first fix.
Work through this list:
- Open your homepage on your phone. Does it load in under three seconds?
- Can you tell what the business does from the first screen alone?
- Is there one obvious button to call, book or request a quote?
- Is the phone number visible and tappable on every page?
- Does the menu have six items or fewer, with plain labels?
- Are your photos real, sharp and relevant to your services?
- Is every paragraph short enough to scan?
- Do fonts, colors and logo look the same on every page?
If you’re starting from scratch, our website design guide walks through the basics, and this breakdown of the benefits of a well-designed website explains what a good design is worth.
Good design is harder than it looks, and most owners are too close to their own site to spot the problems. If your audit turned up more than two or three issues, Wyred Insights offers small business website design that fixes them, so your site turns visitors into calls instead of sending them to a competitor.