What makes a bad website design? Signs yours is costing you

Everyone in the business has an opinion about the website. It looks dated. The homepage is too busy. A competitor’s is nicer. Those opinions are usually where the conversation stops, and they’re rarely where the problem is.

Bad website design is confused design. A site that isn’t clear about who it’s for, and what it wants them to do next, will lose people however good it looks. In B2B, where a buyer might visit a handful of times before deciding, that confusion costs you enquiries you never see.

If you’d rather have the evidence than work through the signs yourself, a UX audit starts at £550 + VAT. In three working days it tells you what’s wrong, what it’s costing you and what to fix first.

Why bad design matters more in B2B

In B2B, your website takes the first meeting for you.

Buyers judge you on the site before they ever speak to you. They’re often comparing three or four firms, and they may be building a shortlist for someone more senior. They don’t owe you a phone call.

A consumer site can lose a visitor and win them back next week with an ad. A B2B site loses a buyer and you never find out who they were.

That’s why good web design is about more than how it looks. It comes down to four things: is it usable, does it work, is it attractive, and is it right for the people it’s for. Most bad sites look fine. They fail on the first and the last.

The signs of bad website design, with examples

Most of these won’t come up in a design review. They show up in what visitors do.

These are the patterns we see most often on B2B sites. They’re examples of a type of problem, not a list of named sites.

• Nobody can tell what you do in five seconds. The homepage opens on “your trusted partner” or “solutions for growth”. An engineering consultancy whose headline could belong to an accountant is making buyers work too hard.
• The navigation follows your org chart. Every department got its own page and services are named after internal teams. The menu shows how the business is structured, not how the buyer decides.
• There’s no clear next step. Every page ends with “Contact us”, or with nothing at all. Someone who’s halfway decided has nowhere to go except a form that asks for everything.
• Clutter hides the point. Sliders, banners, three buttons competing for attention and a paragraph for every service. When everything is on the page, nothing stands out.
• Visual noise. Busy graphics, too many fonts and links scattered through the copy. It looks considered on a big screen in the office and falls apart on a phone.
• It describes the business you used to be. You’ve grown, merged or added services, and the site still talks about the company you were five years ago.
• It’s slow, or breaks on mobile. Pages hang while a large image loads, menus don’t open, forms are hard to fill in with a thumb. Buyers check you out on their phones between meetings.
• Your team can’t update it. Plugins bolted on as workarounds, so every change feels risky. Content goes out of date because nobody wants to be the one who breaks it.
• The wrong people get in touch. Students, competitors and businesses a tenth of the size you sell to. The site speaks to everyone, so sales stops trusting the leads.

None of these is about whether the site is pretty. A good-looking site can have every one of them.

What bad website design is costing you

A bad website doesn’t look like a cost. It looks like a quiet month.

The damage is easy to miss because it’s made of things that didn’t happen: the enquiry that went to a competitor, the buyer who left your shortlist without telling you.

• People leave and you don’t know why. Your analytics show where they drop off, not the reason.
• Your team answers what the site should. Sales and customer services spend the day telling people where things are. Nobody budgeted for that.
• You get compared on price. If the site can’t explain why you’re different, buyers fall back on the number.
• It undermines a good pitch. Sales tells a strong story, then the buyer checks the website and finds a smaller one.
• Every fix is a guess. Without evidence, the money goes on whatever feels most urgent, or whoever argues loudest.
• It lands on you. When someone asks why enquiries are down, you don’t have an answer you’re sure of.

A five-minute self-check

Answer these honestly. If you can’t answer one, that’s an answer too.

• The five-second test. Show your homepage to someone outside the business for five seconds. Can they say what you do and who it’s for?
• The service test. Pick the service that matters most. Would a buyer know which menu item to click to find it?
• The phone test. Open your three most visited pages on your phone. Is there one obvious next step on each?
• The numbers test. Can you say how many enquiries the site brought in last month, and which pages they came from?
• The pitch test. Does the site describe the business your sales team is pitching today?
• The update test. When did someone on your team last change a page without asking a developer?

Two or more “no” or “not sure” answers means the site is costing you. What the check can’t tell you is why, or which problem to fix first.

That’s the catch with checking your own site. Your team knows where everything is, which is exactly why they can’t see what a first-time visitor can’t find.

What doesn’t fix a bad website

The usual fixes treat the look, because the look is what everyone can see.

“It just needs a new look.” A redesign on the same structure is the same site with better photos. If the problem is the story, a new website won’t fix it.

“We need more traffic.” More people arriving at a site that confuses them is the most expensive answer there is.

“Let’s change the button colour.” Small tweaks to the wrong thing move nothing, because none of it was the problem.

“Let’s ask the team what they think.” Everyone has a theory. Without evidence, the loudest one wins and the budget goes on a guess.

“We can sort it in-house.” You’ll get some of the way. Being objective about something you built is the hard part.

What to fix first

Fix what’s costing you the most, not what’s most visible.

In our experience the order is nearly always the same, and the look comes last.

• Clarity. Can a buyer tell what you do, who for and why you? If not, nothing further down the page matters.
• The path. On the pages already getting traffic, is there a next step that fits how ready the visitor is?
• The things that break. Mobile layouts, slow pages and forms that don’t work properly.
• The look. It matters for trust. It just isn’t usually what’s stopping people.

Most sites don’t need rebuilding. They need four things fixed. If the bones are good and people simply have nowhere to go, that’s a job for conversion optimisation, not a new site. There’s more on that in fixing a website that isn’t converting without a redesign.

When to get a UX audit

When the self-check says something’s wrong and nobody agrees what.

A UX audit is a short, fixed-price review of your site by someone who does it for a living. You get a written report: what’s wrong, what it’s costing you and what to do about it, in priority order. We run three levels:

• Clarity Review, £550 + VAT. Messaging, navigation logic and your main conversion points, in three working days.
• Conversion Review, £880 + VAT. Adds multiple journeys, messaging across pages and where people drop off, in five working days.
• Full UX Review, £2,640 + VAT. The whole experience end to end, with journey maps, competitor benchmarks and a prioritised action plan, in seven working days.

• You can see what’s in the way. Every finding comes with what it’s costing you, so the order is set by evidence, not opinion.
• You find what analytics can’t show. Where people get stuck and give up, not just where they leave.
• It settles the argument. Something to put in front of whoever needs convincing, instead of another opinion.
• You can act on it without us. The report is the deliverable. Give it to your team, your developer or another agency.

Not sure what a good audit looks like? Here’s what a UX audit should tell you, and what it shouldn’t.