Blog → Website Design Tips
Published February 22, 2026 · 18 min read · By SpunkArt
Here is an uncomfortable truth about web design in 2026: most websites look fine but convert terribly. You can have a beautiful site with custom illustrations, smooth animations, and pixel-perfect typography, and still watch 97% of your visitors leave without taking a single action. The problem is almost never aesthetics. It is design that ignores how people actually behave on the web.
Conversion-focused web design is not about making things pretty. It is about removing friction, guiding attention, and making the next step obvious. Every font choice, button color, layout decision, and loading second either moves a visitor closer to converting or pushes them toward the back button.
We built 55+ free web tools at SpunkArt and tested every single design principle on this list across our own sites. These are not theoretical suggestions from a design textbook. These are 50 battle-tested website design tips that we have seen produce measurable improvements in conversion rates, time on site, and user engagement.
Whether you are building a landing page, redesigning an existing site, or launching a new product, these tips will help you create a website that converts in 2026 and beyond.
Why this matters: Users form an opinion about your website in 50 milliseconds. That is 0.05 seconds. In that blink, they decide whether to stay or bounce. First impressions are not about dazzling visitors with animations. They are about instant clarity, speed, and trust.
Page speed is the foundation of every conversion. Google research shows that as page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 32%. At 5 seconds, that number jumps to 90%. A slow page is the single fastest way to destroy your conversion rate before a visitor even sees your headline.
Strip out unnecessary JavaScript, compress your images, use a CDN, and serve everything over HTTP/2. If you are not sure where you stand, run your site through a speed test right now. You cannot optimize what you do not measure.
Test Your Speed →Your headline is the most important piece of copy on the entire page. It needs to communicate your value proposition in one sentence that any visitor can understand in under 5 seconds. Avoid clever wordplay, vague slogans, or industry jargon. "We help small businesses get found on Google" converts better than "Empowering digital transformation through innovative solutions."
Test your headline by reading it to someone who knows nothing about your business. If they cannot tell you what you do and why they should care, rewrite it. The best headlines address a specific pain point and hint at the solution.
Every landing page needs exactly one primary call-to-action visible in the initial viewport, before the user scrolls even a single pixel. This does not mean you should only have one CTA on the entire page, but the first thing a visitor sees should include a clear next step. "Start Free Trial," "Get Your Quote," or "See Pricing" all work because they tell the user exactly what happens next.
If your CTA is buried below your mission statement, team photo, and feature list, you are asking visitors to work before they can act. Most of them will not bother.
A missing or default favicon screams "this site is unfinished" louder than almost any other design element. It is that tiny icon in the browser tab, and it is one of the first things savvy users notice. When someone has 15 tabs open (and they always do), your favicon is how they find their way back to your site.
Create a simple, recognizable favicon that works at 16x16 pixels. Use your logo mark, a single letter, or a distinctive symbol. Avoid photographs or detailed images that become unreadable at small sizes. You can generate one in seconds with a free tool.
Create a Favicon →Nothing kills trust faster than a page that looks like a design committee of twelve people each picked their favorite color. A consistent color palette signals professionalism, brand cohesion, and attention to detail. Pick your palette before you design anything else, and stick to it across every page, button, card, and icon.
The fastest approach is to choose one primary brand color, one accent color for interactive elements, and one or two neutral tones for backgrounds and text. Document these hex values and never deviate. Use a palette generator to find harmonious combinations that work together.
Generate a Palette →Custom web fonts from Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts add between 100KB and 500KB of render-blocking resources to your page. They also cause Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT) or Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT), both of which create jarring layout shifts that hurt your CLS score and user experience. System fonts load instantly because they are already installed on every device.
The system font stack system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, sans-serif gives you clean, professional typography on every platform with zero load time. Apple users see San Francisco, Windows users see Segoe UI, and Android users see Roboto. All excellent fonts, all free, all instant.
Every element on your page that does not directly support your conversion goal is actively working against it. Sidebar widgets, auto-playing videos, notification bars, chat bubbles, cookie banners, social media feeds, and newsletter popups all compete for the same finite pool of visitor attention. When everything screams for attention, nothing gets it.
Apply the newspaper test: if a design element does not help a visitor understand your offer or take the desired action within 30 seconds, remove it. Hick's Law tells us that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number of options. Fewer elements means faster decisions means higher conversions.
In 2026, over 60% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices, and for many industries that number exceeds 75%. If you are designing your site on a 27-inch monitor and then "making it responsive" as an afterthought, you are designing for the minority first. Mobile-first means starting with the smallest screen, the tightest constraints, and the most limited attention span.
Mobile-first design forces you to prioritize ruthlessly. When you only have 375 pixels of width, you cannot hide behind multi-column layouts and sprawling navigation menus. You have to decide what truly matters, and that discipline makes your desktop version better too.
Speed tests, favicon generators, color palettes, and more. All free, no signup required.
Get All Design Tools for $9.99 → Resell Web Tools →Why this matters: Layout is the invisible architecture of conversion. Users do not read web pages -- they scan them in predictable patterns. Understanding these patterns and designing your structure around them is the difference between a page that guides visitors toward action and one that lets them wander aimlessly until they leave.
Eye-tracking research has consistently shown that users scan web pages in an F-shaped pattern. They read horizontally across the top of the content area, then move down the page and read across a shorter horizontal area, then scan the left side vertically. This is not a theory. It is documented human behavior backed by decades of eye-tracking studies.
Place your most important content, your headline, value proposition, and primary CTA, along the top horizontal bar of the F. Put supporting information along the second horizontal scan line. Use the left-aligned vertical scan line for navigation, bullet points, and subheadings that pull readers deeper into the page.
Whitespace (also called negative space) is not wasted space. It is one of the most powerful design tools you have. Research from the Human Factors International shows that whitespace between paragraphs and in margins increases comprehension by up to 20%. Apple, Google, and every high-converting SaaS landing page uses generous whitespace because it works.
Whitespace creates visual breathing room, groups related elements together, separates unrelated ones, and draws the eye toward the content that matters. If your page feels cramped or overwhelming, the fix is almost always more whitespace, not less content.
Visual hierarchy is the principle that the size, color, contrast, and position of an element communicates its importance. The biggest element on the page gets noticed first. The highest-contrast element gets attention second. Everything else fades into the background. This is not optional -- it is how the human visual system works.
Your page should have a clear hierarchy: the headline is the largest text, the CTA button is the most colorful element, and supporting copy is smaller and lower contrast. If a visitor squints at your page from across the room, they should be able to identify the three most important elements by size alone.
Sticky (fixed) navigation keeps your menu visible as users scroll down the page. This is critical for long-form pages, blog posts, product pages, and any content that extends beyond two viewport heights. Without sticky navigation, users who want to navigate to another section have to scroll all the way back to the top, and most of them will hit the back button instead.
Keep your sticky nav minimal. Logo on the left, 3 to 5 navigation links, and a CTA button on the right. Make it slightly transparent or reduce its height when scrolled to avoid taking up too much screen real estate. On mobile, consider a sticky bottom bar with your primary CTA instead of a top nav.
Breadcrumbs are the small navigational text trail that shows users where they are in your site hierarchy, like "Home > Products > Running Shoes > Men's." They serve two purposes: they help users understand their location within your site, and they provide an easy way to jump back to higher-level pages without relying on the browser back button.
For SEO, breadcrumbs are equally valuable. Google often displays breadcrumb paths in search results, giving your listing more visual real estate and context. Add structured data markup to your breadcrumbs so search engines can parse them correctly. Any site with more than two levels of depth should have breadcrumbs on every interior page.
Card-based layouts have become the standard for presenting collections of related but distinct items: products, blog posts, features, team members, pricing plans, or testimonials. Cards work because they create natural visual containers that users intuitively understand as individual units. Each card is a self-contained piece of content with clear boundaries.
Design your cards with consistent padding (16 to 24 pixels), subtle borders or shadows, rounded corners (8 to 12 pixels radius), and a clear internal hierarchy: image or icon on top, title, brief description, and an action link. Pinterest, Airbnb, and Trello all use cards for good reason -- they scale beautifully from mobile to desktop.
Random spacing is one of the most common amateur design mistakes. When padding and margins vary arbitrarily across your site, the result feels chaotic even if users cannot articulate why. An 8-pixel grid system eliminates this problem entirely. Every margin, padding, and gap value is a multiple of 8: 8px, 16px, 24px, 32px, 40px, 48px, and so on.
The 8px grid is the industry standard because it divides evenly on most screen sizes, aligns with common font sizes and line heights, and creates a natural visual rhythm. Google's Material Design, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, and most major design systems are built on this grid. Adopt it and your layouts will feel instantly more polished.
The optimal line length for readability is between 50 and 75 characters per line. On a typical 1920-pixel-wide monitor with no width constraint, a paragraph of text stretches to over 150 characters per line, forcing the reader's eyes to travel uncomfortably far from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. Reading speed drops, comprehension decreases, and users bounce.
Set a max-width of 800 pixels on your content container. This keeps line lengths in the optimal range on desktop while allowing the text to flow naturally on smaller screens. Every major blog, documentation site, and news publication uses this constraint. Notice how this very article caps at 800 pixels. It is not an accident.
While text content should be constrained to 800 pixels, hero sections, testimonial bands, feature showcases, and image galleries benefit from breaking out to full width. Full-width sections create visual contrast against the narrower content sections, which makes them feel more important and draws the eye to key messages.
Use full-width sections sparingly and strategically. A hero section at the top, a social proof band in the middle, and a final CTA section at the bottom is a classic layout that converts well. If every section is full-width, the impact is diluted and the page loses its visual rhythm.
Your footer is not an afterthought. Analytics consistently show that a significant percentage of users scroll to the bottom of the page, especially on homepages and landing pages. A well-designed footer acts as a secondary navigation, a trust signal, and a last chance to convert before the user leaves.
Include links to your most important pages, contact information, social media profiles, legal pages (privacy policy, terms of service), and a newsletter signup or secondary CTA. Organize footer links into logical columns with clear headings. A footer that provides comprehensive navigation reduces bounce rates by giving users who did not find what they wanted another path forward.
Why this matters: Color and typography are the emotional backbone of your design. They communicate trust, urgency, professionalism, and personality before a single word is read. The wrong font or color combination can undermine even the strongest content and most compelling offer.
The most effective website color schemes use exactly three colors: a primary brand color, an accent color for calls-to-action, and a neutral color for backgrounds and body text. That is it. Adding a fourth, fifth, or sixth color does not make your site more interesting. It makes it harder to scan, harder to navigate, and harder to remember.
The 60-30-10 rule is the simplest framework for applying your three colors. Your neutral color covers 60% of the page (backgrounds, body text), your primary brand color covers 30% (headings, navigation, cards), and your accent color covers just 10% (buttons, links, key highlights). This ratio creates visual balance and ensures your CTAs stand out.
WCAG 2.1 requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. This is not just an accessibility requirement -- it is a readability requirement. Low-contrast text (like light gray on white or dark gray on black) forces users to strain their eyes, which increases cognitive load and decreases the time they spend reading your content.
Test every text and background color combination on your site against WCAG standards. Pay special attention to text over images, text on colored backgrounds, and placeholder text in form fields. These are the three areas where contrast failures are most common. Use a contrast checker to verify before you ship.
Check Color Contrast →Dark mode is no longer a novelty -- it is an expectation. Over 80% of smartphone users prefer dark mode, and the number keeps climbing. Offering dark mode reduces eye strain in low-light environments, saves battery on OLED screens, and signals that your site is modern and user-centric. Sites like Spunk.Bet use a dark theme by default because it looks sharp, reduces glare, and keeps users comfortable during extended sessions -- dark theme done right.
Implement dark mode using CSS custom properties and the prefers-color-scheme media query. This respects the user's system preference automatically. Store any manual toggle preference in localStorage so it persists across sessions. Test every component in both modes because colors that work on white backgrounds often need adjustment on dark ones.
A clear typographic scale uses no more than three to four distinct font sizes across the entire page. A typical scale might be: body text at 16px, subheadings at 20px, section headings at 28px, and the page title at 36px. Every piece of text on the page should map to one of these sizes. If you find yourself creating a fifth size "just for this one element," you have a hierarchy problem, not a size problem.
Using a mathematical ratio like 1.25 (Major Third) or 1.333 (Perfect Fourth) to generate your scale creates sizes that feel naturally related. Tools like type-scale.com let you preview these ratios instantly. Consistent sizing makes your content easier to scan and your design easier to maintain.
Line height (or leading) is the vertical space between lines of text. A line height of 1.0 means lines touch each other. A line height of 2.0 means there is an entire line of blank space between each line. For body text, the sweet spot is 1.5 to 1.6. This gives the eye enough room to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next without losing its place.
Headings can use tighter line heights (1.1 to 1.3) because they are shorter and larger. Long-form content like blog posts and documentation should use the higher end of the range (1.6 to 1.75) to maximize readability over extended reading sessions. This article uses a line height of 1.7 -- notice how comfortable it is to read.
Your accent color is the most powerful visual tool in your design system. It says "look here, this is important, this is what you should do next." If you use your accent color on decorative borders, background patterns, section headers, social media icons, and your CTA button, the button stops standing out. The accent loses its power through overuse.
Audit your site right now and find every instance of your accent color. If it appears on anything other than buttons, critical links, and key data points, remove it. The more sparingly you use your accent color, the more effectively it draws attention to the elements that drive conversion.
Color choices are not arbitrary. Decades of marketing research have established consistent emotional associations with colors. Orange communicates action, energy, and urgency -- which is why it is a popular choice for CTA buttons and sale banners. Green signals trust, safety, and success, making it effective for confirmation messages, pricing, and "go" signals. Blue conveys calm, professionalism, and reliability, which is why banks, healthcare companies, and enterprise software companies gravitate toward it.
Choose your color palette with intent, not just aesthetics. If you are building a financial product, lean toward blue. If you want to drive immediate action, use orange or red for your CTAs. If you are in health or sustainability, green reinforces your brand message. The color should match the emotional response you want from your visitors.
Flat, solid-color backgrounds can feel dated in 2026. Subtle CSS gradients add depth, dimension, and visual interest without adding any page weight. Unlike background images, CSS gradients are rendered by the browser using pure math. They are infinitely scalable, resolution-independent, and add exactly zero bytes to your page load time.
Use gradients on hero sections, CTA boxes, and feature cards. Keep them subtle -- a gradient from one shade of blue to a slightly different shade of blue is more elegant than a rainbow. Dark sites benefit from gradients that go from one dark tone to a slightly lighter or warmer dark tone. Build and preview your gradients instantly with a generator.
Build a CSS Gradient →Generate palettes, check contrast ratios, build gradients, and more -- all free at SpunkArt.
Get All Design Tools for $9.99 → Resell Web Tools →Why this matters: Your CTA is where design meets revenue. Every layout decision, color choice, and content block on your page exists for one purpose: to lead the visitor to this moment. A well-designed CTA can double or triple your conversion rate. A poorly designed one can make everything else you did irrelevant.
The paradox of choice is real. When you present visitors with multiple equally weighted options -- "Buy Now," "Learn More," "Schedule a Demo," "Download the PDF," "Watch the Video" -- conversion rates drop because decision-making becomes harder. Each page should have one primary action you want the user to take. Everything else is secondary.
This does not mean you can only have one button on the page. It means one action should be visually dominant. Your primary CTA gets the accent color, the largest size, and the most prominent placement. Secondary options get outlined styles, smaller sizes, and less prominent positions. The visual hierarchy should make the preferred action obvious.
The word on your CTA button is arguably the most important word on your entire page. "Submit" is a wasted opportunity. "Click Here" is even worse. High-converting button text uses specific action verbs that tell users exactly what they will get: "Start My Free Trial," "Get Your Quote," "Download the Guide," "Create My Account." The verb describes the outcome, not the mechanics.
First-person phrasing often outperforms second-person. "Start My Free Trial" tends to convert better than "Start Your Free Trial" because it creates a sense of ownership before the user has even clicked. Test both variations for your audience, but default to action verbs that describe the value the user receives.
Your CTA button must be the most visually distinct element on the page. This means its color should contrast not only with the background but with every other element around it. If your page is blue, your CTA should not be a different shade of blue. It should be orange, green, or another color that does not appear anywhere else on the page.
The Von Restorff Effect (also called the isolation effect) tells us that items that visually stand out from their surroundings are more likely to be remembered and acted upon. Your CTA button should feel almost uncomfortably bold. If it blends in even slightly, it is not contrasting enough. Squint at your page. Can you instantly spot the button? If not, increase the contrast.
Some visitors are ready to convert immediately. Others need to read your entire page before they are convinced. Placing your CTA only above the fold misses the convinced scrollers. Placing it only at the bottom misses the ready-now visitors. The solution is both: one CTA in the hero section and at least one more after your strongest proof section or feature explanation.
On long-form landing pages, a good rhythm is to place a CTA every two to three scroll depths. After the hero, after the features section, after the testimonials, and as a final standalone section at the bottom. Each CTA can use slightly different supporting text tailored to the content above it while maintaining the same primary action.
Urgency works. Countdown timers, limited availability notices, and seasonal offers consistently increase conversion rates. But fake urgency destroys trust permanently. If your "sale ends tonight" timer resets every day, or your "only 3 left" counter never changes, users will notice. And once they catch you being dishonest, they will never trust your site again.
Use real urgency that you can stand behind. Limited-time pricing tied to an actual date. Genuine inventory counts that update in real-time. Early-bird pricing for events with real deadlines. Seasonal offers that actually end when they say they will. Real urgency converts better than fake urgency because it is believable.
The most effective position for testimonials, customer logos, review scores, and usage stats is directly adjacent to your CTA button. The reason is psychological: at the moment a visitor is deciding whether to click, they are experiencing uncertainty. Social proof resolves that uncertainty. "Join 10,000+ businesses" or a five-star review snippet placed right above or below the CTA button gives visitors the confidence nudge they need.
The best social proof is specific and verifiable. "Trusted by 10,847 customers" is more credible than "Trusted by thousands." A named testimonial with a photo and company name is more convincing than an anonymous quote. Star ratings with review counts outperform vague superlatives. Make your social proof concrete, and position it where it matters most.
Every additional form field reduces your conversion rate. This is one of the most documented findings in conversion optimization. A study by HubSpot found that reducing form fields from 4 to 3 increased conversions by 50%. If you are asking for a name, email, phone number, company name, job title, company size, and "how did you hear about us" on a newsletter signup form, you are sabotaging yourself.
Ask yourself for each field: do I absolutely need this information right now, at this moment, to deliver on the promise of this form? An email signup needs an email. A contact form needs a name, email, and message. A shipping form needs an address. Everything beyond the minimum should be collected later, after you have earned the user's trust and engagement.
When a process requires multiple steps -- checkout flows, onboarding sequences, application forms -- users need to know two things at all times: how far they have come and how much is left. A progress bar or step indicator at the top of each screen answers both questions instantly. Without it, users face an unknown commitment, and uncertainty kills completion rates.
Design your progress indicator to show completed steps, the current step, and remaining steps. Use checkmarks for completed steps, a highlighted state for the current step, and muted styling for future steps. Keep the total number of steps to five or fewer. If your process has more steps, consider grouping related fields into logical phases.
Exit-intent technology detects when a user's cursor moves toward the browser's close button or address bar and triggers a final offer before they leave. When implemented well, exit-intent popups recover between 10% and 15% of abandoning visitors. That is 10 to 15 people out of every 100 who were about to leave forever.
The key is offering something genuinely valuable that was not already on the page: a discount code, a free downloadable resource, an extended trial, or a personalized recommendation. Make the popup easy to dismiss (a clear X and "No thanks" link), limit it to one display per session, and never show it to returning visitors who already dismissed it.
The pricing page is the highest-intent page on most SaaS and service websites. Users who navigate to your pricing page are actively considering buying. Yet most pricing pages are bare tables with plan names, prices, and feature lists. This is a missed opportunity. Your pricing page should sell, not just list.
Add a value-oriented headline ("Choose the plan that grows with you"), social proof ("Join 5,000+ teams"), a FAQ section addressing common objections, a comparison table that highlights your recommended plan, and a money-back guarantee. The pricing page should answer every remaining question and remove every remaining objection so the user can buy with confidence.
Why this matters: Images and media are responsible for the majority of page weight on most websites. A single unoptimized hero image can be larger than the rest of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript combined. Getting images right means faster loading, better SEO, stronger visual impact, and a more accessible experience for all users.
The average web page in 2026 weighs over 2.5MB, and images account for roughly half of that. Compressing images can reduce file sizes by 60% to 80% with virtually no visible quality loss. A 1.2MB hero image can often be compressed to 250KB without any perceptible difference, shaving a full second off your load time on typical connections.
Run every image through a compression tool before uploading. Use lossy compression for photographs (JPEG quality 75-85) and lossless compression for graphics, logos, and screenshots (PNG with optimization). Never upload an image straight from your camera, design tool, or stock photo library without compressing it first.
Compress Images Free →Lazy loading delays the downloading of images that are not visible in the initial viewport until the user scrolls near them. This means a page with 20 images only loads the first 2 or 3 on initial page render, then progressively loads the rest as the user scrolls down. The result is dramatically faster initial page loads and less bandwidth wasted on images that users might never see.
In 2026, native lazy loading is the standard approach. Adding loading="lazy" to your image tags is all it takes -- no JavaScript library required. Every modern browser supports it. Do not lazy load your above-the-fold hero image or LCP element, as this will actually hurt your Largest Contentful Paint score. Only lazy load images below the fold.
WebP delivers the same visual quality as JPEG and PNG at 25% to 35% smaller file sizes. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, transparency (like PNG), and animation (like GIF). In 2026, every major browser including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge fully supports WebP. There is no longer any reason to serve JPEG or PNG as your primary image format.
Convert your existing images to WebP using your image editing software, a command-line tool like cwebp, or an online converter. For maximum compatibility, use the HTML picture element with a WebP source and a JPEG/PNG fallback, though the fallback is increasingly unnecessary as browser support is now effectively universal.
Users can spot stock photography instantly, and it erodes trust. The smiling call-center agent with a headset, the diverse team of business people high-fiving around a conference table, the woman laughing alone with salad -- these images are so overused that they have become visual shorthand for "this company is not showing you anything real."
Use authentic photographs of your actual product, your real team, your genuine workspace, and your true customers (with permission). Even a slightly imperfect real photo builds more trust than a polished stock image. If you must use stock photography, choose candid, natural-looking images and never use images that appear on your competitors' sites.
Telling visitors your software has "an intuitive dashboard with powerful analytics" is far less convincing than showing them a screenshot of the actual dashboard with real data. "Show, don't tell" is as true in web design as it is in storytelling. A 5-second product demo GIF embedded in your hero section communicates more than 500 words of feature descriptions ever could.
For SaaS products, embed interactive demos using tools like Loom, Arcade, or simple screen recordings. For physical products, use high-quality product photography from multiple angles. For services, show before-and-after results or case study visuals. Every claim you make becomes more credible when you can show visual evidence to support it.
Alt text serves two critical purposes: it makes your images accessible to screen reader users and visually impaired visitors, and it helps search engines understand what your images depict. Images without alt text are invisible to a significant portion of your audience and leave SEO value on the table. Both of these are unacceptable in 2026.
Write alt text that is descriptive and specific. "Dashboard showing monthly revenue chart with 47% growth" is good. "Image" or "dashboard.png" is useless. Decorative images (borders, spacers, background textures) should have empty alt attributes (alt="") so screen readers skip them. Every informational image needs meaningful, context-rich alt text.
Why this matters: A website that converts but cannot be found is a tree falling in an empty forest. Technical SEO ensures that search engines can discover, crawl, index, and rank your pages correctly. Every page needs proper metadata, structured data, and technical hygiene to compete in 2026 search results.
Every page on your site needs a unique title tag (under 60 characters) and meta description (under 160 characters) that accurately describe the page's content and include your target keywords naturally. These are the snippets that appear in Google search results, and they are your first and often only chance to convince a searcher to click.
Write title tags as "[Primary Keyword] - [Benefit or Context] | [Brand]" and meta descriptions as compelling two-sentence summaries that include a call to action. Never duplicate meta tags across pages. Never leave them blank. Every page with blank or duplicate metadata is a missed ranking opportunity. Use a meta tag generator to speed up the process.
Generate Meta Tags →When someone shares your page on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Slack, Discord, or iMessage, the platform pulls the OpenGraph tags from your HTML to generate a rich link preview. Without OG tags, shared links appear as plain URLs with no image, title, or description. With them, your shared links become visual, clickable, and compelling.
At minimum, set og:title, og:description, og:image (at least 1200x630 pixels), and og:url on every page. For X/Twitter, add the corresponding twitter:card tags. Preview how your links will appear on each platform before publishing, because a broken or missing social preview can cut your social traffic in half.
/blog/50-website-design-tips-convert is a clean URL. /blog/post?id=4729&category=design&ref=nav is not. Clean URLs are shorter, more descriptive, easier to share, and better for SEO. They tell both users and search engines what the page is about before they even visit it. Google has confirmed that keywords in URLs are a minor ranking factor.
Use lowercase letters, separate words with hyphens (not underscores), keep URLs under 60 characters when possible, and avoid unnecessary parameters, session IDs, or file extensions. Remove stop words like "and," "the," and "of" to keep URLs concise. A slug generator can help you create optimized URLs from any title.
Generate Clean URLs →An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file that lists every page on your site along with metadata about when each page was last updated and how important it is relative to other pages. It helps search engines discover all of your pages, especially new ones that might not yet have internal links pointing to them.
Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Update it automatically whenever you add, remove, or significantly modify pages. For sites with fewer than 500 pages, a simple static sitemap is fine. For larger sites, generate your sitemap dynamically. Either way, making one takes seconds with the right tool.
Generate a Sitemap →Your robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site they are allowed to access and which parts they should ignore. Without one, crawlers will attempt to index everything, including admin panels, staging pages, duplicate content, and internal search results that dilute your SEO equity.
At minimum, your robots.txt should disallow access to admin areas, internal search result pages, and any duplicate or thin content. It should also include a link to your XML sitemap so crawlers can find it immediately. A misconfigured robots.txt can accidentally block your entire site from being indexed, so test it carefully or use a generator that handles the syntax for you.
Generate robots.txt →Structured data (JSON-LD markup) tells search engines exactly what your content represents: a product with a price and rating, a recipe with ingredients and cook time, a FAQ with questions and answers, an article with an author and publish date. Pages with structured data are eligible for rich snippets -- enhanced search results with star ratings, images, prices, and other eye-catching elements.
Rich snippets consistently achieve higher click-through rates than standard results. A product listing with a 4.8-star rating and price displayed directly in search results gets more clicks than a plain blue link. Start with the structured data types most relevant to your content: Article, Product, FAQ, HowTo, and LocalBusiness cover most use cases. Validate your markup with Google's Rich Results Test before deploying.
Why this matters: Every tip on this list is based on data and best practices, but your audience is unique. What works for a B2B SaaS landing page might not work for an e-commerce store. Testing is how you turn general principles into specific, proven strategies for your site and your visitors.
Your headline is the single highest-leverage element on any page. Changing a headline can swing conversion rates by 20% to 50% or more. But you cannot know which headline works best by guessing, by committee vote, or by asking your designer. You have to test it with real traffic and real data. Run your two best headline options simultaneously, split traffic evenly, and let statistical significance tell you the winner.
A proper A/B test needs a large enough sample size to be statistically valid. Running a test for 48 hours with 50 visitors proves nothing. Use a sample size calculator to determine how much traffic you need before the results are meaningful. Most tests need between 1,000 and 10,000 visitors per variation depending on the baseline conversion rate and the minimum detectable effect you care about.
Calculate Sample Size →Chrome DevTools' device mode is a useful approximation, but it is not a real phone. It does not replicate actual touch targets, real scroll performance, native browser chrome, viewport quirks, or the experience of using your site on a 4G connection with a cracked screen on a crowded bus. If your only mobile testing is resizing a browser window, you are shipping untested code to your majority audience.
Test on at least three real devices: a mid-range Android phone (where most of the world browses), a recent iPhone, and a tablet. Test on actual cellular connections, not your office Wi-Fi. Test form inputs with real thumbs, not mouse clicks. Test navigation with actual swipe gestures. The gap between browser simulation and real-device experience is where conversion-killing bugs hide and where your competitors gain an edge.
Every tool linked throughout this article is available for free at SpunkArt. No signup, no trial, no limits. Here is the complete list of tools that support the design tips above:
Core Web Vitals check
Create professional favicons
Generate harmonious palettes
WCAG accessibility checker
Build modern gradients
Optimize images for web
SEO meta tags in seconds
Social card previews
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QR codes for any URL
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Website design tips are only valuable if you actually implement them. The 50 tips in this guide cover every layer of conversion-focused design: first impressions, layout structure, color and typography, CTAs, image optimization, SEO fundamentals, and testing. But reading a list is not the same as applying it.
Here is your action plan:
The websites that convert are not the most beautiful ones. They are the fastest, clearest, and most focused. They respect the user's time, guide the user's attention, and make the next step obvious at every point in the journey. Every one of these 50 tips moves you closer to that standard.
"Good design is invisible. Great design converts."
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