What Makes a Good Website Design? 10 Things That Actually Matter
Good website design is measured by how quickly a stranger understands what you do, believes you, and knows what to do next. Everything else — the palette, the animations, the typeface — is in service of that or it is decoration.
Here are ten standards worth holding a site to, each testable rather than a matter of taste.
1. It says what it is within five seconds
A visitor should know what you sell and who it is for without scrolling. Not a slogan — a sentence.
Test it: show your homepage to someone unfamiliar for five seconds, then close it and ask what the company does. If they cannot answer, no amount of visual polish will rescue it.
2. It loads fast on a mid-range phone
Speed is design. A beautiful site that takes six seconds to appear has already lost most of its visitors.
The numbers to hold: largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds, interaction latency under 200 milliseconds, and almost no layout shift as things load. Test on a mid-range Android over mobile data, not on your laptop over office wifi.
3. It was designed for the phone first
Most visitors arrive on a phone. A desktop layout squeezed down is not a mobile design — tap targets end up too small, text too dense, and forms unusable.
Test it: complete your own primary action — enquiry, purchase, booking — on your phone, one-handed, outdoors. Frustration is the finding.
4. There is one obvious next step per screen
Every section should have a single clear action. Five equally weighted buttons is the same as none: the visitor is asked to make a decision instead of being guided through one.
5. Text is comfortable to read
Body text around 16–18px, line length near 60–75 characters, generous line height, and real contrast against the background. Light grey text on white is the most common self-inflicted wound in modern web design — it looks refined in a mockup and is genuinely hard to read for anyone over forty.
The standard: 4.5:1 contrast for body text. It is measurable, not a preference.
6. It is navigable by keyboard and screen reader
Roughly one in six people has a disability. Accessible design is also better design for everyone: clear focus states, sensible heading order, real labels on form fields, alt text that describes the image.
Test it: put your mouse away and navigate with Tab alone. If you cannot see where you are, or cannot reach something, neither can a portion of your customers.
7. It is consistent
One spacing scale, one type scale, a small palette used the same way everywhere. Consistency is what makes a site feel professional. Inconsistency reads as carelessness even when nobody can name what is wrong.
8. It shows evidence, not adjectives
"Industry-leading" persuades nobody. A named client, a specific number, a real screenshot, a testimonial with a full name and company — those do. Replace every claim you cannot evidence with one you can.
9. Motion has a job
Animation should explain a change: where a panel came from, that something loaded, that an action registered. Motion that exists to impress gets in the way on the second visit and is the first thing to feel dated.
Respect prefers-reduced-motion. Some people get motion sick from parallax, and their browser already says so.
10. It works when things go wrong
Empty states, error messages, slow connections, a mistyped URL. These are unglamorous and they are where trust is won or lost. An error message that explains what happened and what to do next is design work.
How do you judge your own site?
Open it on your phone, on mobile data, and be honest:
- Did you understand the offer before scrolling?
- Did it feel instant?
- Was the next step obvious?
- Could you read it comfortably?
- Did anything look broken at your thumb's reach?
Most sites fail on speed and clarity long before aesthetics. That is good news — both are fixable, and both are what a properly built website should deliver as a baseline rather than an upgrade.
If you want the related question of what this costs, we wrote an honest breakdown of website pricing.