Website Design Principles That Boosts SEO and Increase Revenue

Understanding key website design principles is critical to building online success, but this isn’t a simple process. Navigating website responsiveness, brand imaging, conversion optimization strategies, and keeping up with Google’s ever-changing algorithm updates makes it difficult for most website owners to create well-ranked sites.

Website design must contribute to your business’s bottom line. It must convert visitors to leads. Effective website design does this by providing an exceptional visitor experience. Conversion optimization, website performance, and appearance are all factors that directly affect your business. You can improve each of these areas by utilizing professional web design services. Good website design principles achieve these goals.

Like any other investment in an asset, you get what you put into it. That doesn’t mean constant spending on trendy, unproven strategies is worth the investment. However, some principles of website design matter significantly.

Has Google’s algorithm changed again? Did you know that, in 2022 alone, Google launched 4,725 changes to search processes. That means it’s making 13 changes every day. Sounds impossible to overcome, right? It doesn’t have to be. Why is web design important? Because it can overcome these challenges and maintain your position in the search engines. The design elements, functionality, and overall optimization continue to perform for you.

In this article, we’ll explore the principles of website design that continue to dominate and are present on nearly all top-ranking websites. These are good website design principles for any industry – no matter the type of service business or product-based business you run.

Once you understand the importance of web design, we’ll provide you with step-by-step instructions for mastering the process.

Key takeaways:

Understanding the principles of website design helps you create a website that responds to your readers.
By learning these specific principles of website design, you create an engaging website that brings searchers to you and converts them into customers or leads.

Avoiding key mistakes can minimize frustrations for your readers, but if you follow these principles of website design, you’ll avoid most of those mistakes.
SITESPRING provides you with the tools and resources to help you achieve your goals using the most effective and proven principles of website design.

Define the Website’s Purpose

Principles of Website Design: Instantly Communicate Purpose and Engage

When someone lands on your homepage or any other page, they need to see they are in the right place instantly. People have incredibly short attention spans, and hitting the back button and finding someone else is very easy. That’s why good web design incorporates clear information about what the website is for. Here are some tips to ensure good website design principles are met:

Define the core purpose of your website. What will it do, and what resources will it provide?
Eliminate anything unnecessary on the page that’s distracting.
Incorporate visually attractive, well-laid-out pages that are true to your brand identity.
Focus on essential content and features people expect to see.

Mobile-friendly Website Design shown on smartphone and tablet

All Website Design Elements Should Sync with Your Web Design Goal and Functionality

As you consider the principles of good web design, let’s be clear. You want website visitors to become customers. Everything you do needs to focus on turning these potential customers into leads for your business. Follow these good website design principles.

Creative Website Design concept with wireframes and color palette

Navigation and Structure Website Design Principles

You want users to love your website, but you also need to ensure it’s designed in a way that anyone can navigate through it. A well-designed website showcases your brand and service and helps encourage people to move deeper into it, encouraging them to learn more and contact you. There are several ways to achieve this:

Create Intuitive Menu Structures for Effective Web Design

Good user experience partially depends on the ability to move from the easy web page they land on to the page where they sign up. The navigation menu should make that easy. Choose a layout that presents the most important, big topic first and then pages that support it.

You can use a top menu, which is very common, or a sidebar menu to help users navigate. No matter what the goal is, topics like “services” that list pages of the services you offer make sense. The menu should be easy to navigate, and that’s a critical component of website design principles. Website menus should work like a well-designed telephone auto attendant that easily routes the caller to the destination they seek.

Implement Clear and Descriptive Labels in Website Design Principles

Here’s another valuable consideration for good website design principles. Keep it simple when it comes to labeling your site navigation and overall structure, allowing website visitors to fully understand your site as soon as they land on it. The visual design should be clear and clean, and use descriptive and expected terms on your page. For a real estate website, for example, you may use labels such as:

Sell your home
Find homes for sale

As you consider what to put on your site and follow these principles of website design, focus on usability and simplicity. Complex designs with trickery don’t work and don’t offer any real benefit to search engines, which use them to determine where to rank your site.

Provide Search Functionality

Another principle of good website design applies to complex menus, e-commerce, or otherwise large websites, and it uses search functionality. Consumers want a site that’s user-friendly. If they want information on a specific service you offer or something they saw on your site before, a search feature lets them easily find it. For example, if you have a real estate website where you want to enable your visitors to search by specific criteria, this tool can be highly effective.

Website Design Principles: Visual Hierarchy

People are visually stimulated before anything else. That’s why good website design principles always focus on the visual elements. There are many elements of this design process that are critical, but focusing on these key areas will help you build a visually striking site that impresses people, gives them an instant understanding of your site’s features and use, and encourages them to engage.

When choosing images or visual components, focus on these areas as principles of good website design:

Use images. Blocks of text are not attractive or worthy of navigating.
Tell a story with your images. Be personal by using your own images when someone expects to learn about you.
Ensure your images support your content. The image captures the attention, encouraging them to reach.
Use images to break up walls of text. Sometimes, you need to provide a lot of info, but visuals keep people scrolling down the page.
Keep paragraphs short. Use negative space or white space to make information easy to take in.

One of the elements you’ll often read about as core website design principles is the use of chunks of digestible information. Why does that matter? It’s simple. People scrolling on their phones want to see the important elements fast and move on. If the user sees a block of text that is too long, they will likely scroll past it.

To achieve these website design principles, focus on:

Headings that provide clear focus with keywords that tell people exactly what they will read
Bullet points that make skimming fast and easy
Empty areas on the page that help minimize clutter
Keep continuous text to no more than 250-300 words
Break up your text content with visual elements

Creating an easy-to-read website isn’t hard, especially when applying these design principles. There are many templates you’ll find that offer high-quality layouts that allow the good stuff – the meat of your content – to really stand out and hit home.

Organize Content for Easy Scanning

The principles of good web design always focus on making it easy for the user to navigate. Organize your content in various ways, such as:

Using typeface and typography that’s easy to read
Use font sizes to help big, important elements stand out
Use a header in a different color or bolding to make it more prominent
Use contrast to help guide attention to encourage a person to move through the site
Balance text and visual elements to create a nice flow and movement through the site

Modern Website Design layout with responsive user interface

Responsive Design Is a Critical Component of Website Design Principles

Your website needs to be responsive and functional across all device types. When we design a website, we need to think about where people are going to see it. Move often, that’s mobile devices. Consider the following stats from Hubspot about why mobile design is so important:

46% of Americans spend 5 to 6 hours of their day on their phones.
55.4% of internet users use mobile phones to buy
There are over 1 billion tablet users.

Your website must be optimized in such a way that the layout, functionality, and visual elements are easy to use across all types of websites. These are good website design principles you cannot overlook.

Maintain consistency across your page to encourage readability and accessibility. Keeping things clean and organized delivers an easy-to-use website. Investing in these core principles of website design improves overall results – your website does what you want it to do.

Professional Website Design services for small businesses

Principles of Website Design in Content Creation

Quality content is crucial when considering website design principles and how well a site looks and functions. Consider the best home services website design. Your site looks good and provides a clean way to navigate it. However, if people are not getting there or engaging once they do, it may be the quality of the content on the site.

Content Could Be the Problem – and a Few Website Design Principles Can Help

Apply the following principles of website design to your content to improve outcomes:

Write clear content.
Keep your marketing copy concise. Remember, no big walls of text here.
Do not skimp here. The words on your page represent your business. Are they communicating your brand properly?
Legibility matters, too. Keep content easy to understand.
Measure content readability, which focuses on word choices and structure. A good starting point is the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level formula. Anything you use, focus on simple.

Your design choices should support the content on your page. For example, to make a point, using bolded words or more prominent fonts can help anchor the most important details.

To help you master the website design principles when content is your focus, start with this model. Utilize this model as you communicate with your readers when they first arrive at your page.

Utilize the PAS Copy Model in Web Design

In every project, we aim to convert visitors into leads and improve user experience with marketing know-how. That starts with the PAS copy model, a simple way to address the reader’s needs, summarize their experience, and offer a solution. Let’s examine how that works. Using this model, the reader better understands the problem, the implications of the problem, and then how to solve it. It is one of the most effective forms of communicating with a person seeking an answer to a question in a blog article, for example.

Problem: What are the pains of your target audience?

Let’s say you’re an agent. Your real estate web design needs to take into consideration the specific pains your clients have – knowing what’s available, getting the right price, and navigating the home-buying experience. They struggle with too much or too little information. In the first few lines of your landing page, address these pains. Acknowledge that you “get them” and that opens the door to convince them you can help. Present what indeed will resonate with the problem they are trying to solve.

Agitation: Agitate the Reader so that they understand the full extent of the problem

In this step, we’re digging in and giving them a reason to be frustrated with everything else that is out there. You’re not salesy here but rather clear about the problem’s impact on their life. For that real estate agent, you may want to discuss the importance of making the right decision in buying a home within a specific community and the implications of mistakes.

Solution: Give them what they need

At this point, you’re communicating how you can solve their problem. Your target audience wants to know what you’ll specifically do to help them resolve the situation. This is their first impression of what you will do for them. Make it clear and to the point.

Utilizing this component of the principles of website design can truly commit people to moving deeper into your page and becoming your customers.

Typography and Readability Are Also Principles of Website Design

Here’s another of the most important, good website design principles. Fancy, hard-to-read fonts don’t elevate your website. They frustrate the reader. It’s that simple.

The principles of good website design absolutely have to take into consideration the person reading that content. If they cannot understand the font, they will move on. Choose fonts that are:

Easy to read.
Expected and “normal” fonts.
Dark enough coloring to make them easy to see against the color of your page.

Create proper font size and line spacing for your content. Note that it’s critical to create accessible websites so that people with some level of limitation in their ability to read content and use websites are not limited. Follow the rules under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Architectural Barriers Act to help you navigate these guidelines, especially for fonts and typography.

Also, note that consistency matters. Avoid using a different font from one page to the next. Uniformity is a clear component of the principles of good website design because it clearly represents your brand.

Website Design Principles: Color and Branding

An over-the-top website, one packed with color and super cool imagery, sounds great. But is it? Not when we think about the principles of good website design. Too many colors on a website will simply not look good.

As you reflect on good website design principles, go back to the same topic we’ve discussed throughout. Your website needs to be designed for the people reading it. When it comes to color, consider these good website design principles:

Choose a cohesive color palette comprised of just a few colors. You want it to create the image you desire.
If you haven’t done so yet, consider color psychology.
Make sure your website color scheme aligns with your brand. You want them to be memorable.

Also, consider the importance of using color to enhance usability and accessibility. For example, color can help important details stand out. It can also help you to put more emphasis on various areas.

However, don’t overlook the importance of accessibility. If you’re using bright yellow on a white background, that’s frustratingly hard to see. Make sure you’re creating content that’s easy to see on the page. Good website design principles make your site simple to use.

Website Design Principles for Load Time and Performance

Here are the facts and principles of good website design and performance: Page speed matters. You have under 2.5 seconds for your webpage to load before someone hits that back arrow and moves on. So, how do we do this?
- You need a well-designed website.
- If you are using animations or videos, they need to be designed to not take up so many network resources that they slow the site down.
- If you are using hero images – those big images at the top of the page – they cannot weigh download times.
Consider core web vitals, or CWV, a type of back-end look at the functionality of the site that specifically focuses on stability but also speed. If you haven’t learned about it, now is the ideal time to do so to incorporate these principles of good website design. Google prefers ranking sites with better performance because it is a reflection of user experience.

Implement caching strategies. It’s another type of back-end component, but caching strategies help browsers remember content so it can load faster.

Accessibility and Website Design Principles

We touched on this before as we navigated the principles of good website design. It’s worth focusing on again. Your site needs to have:
- ADA compliance
- Provide alternative text for images
- Use sufficient color contrast to ensure the font is easy to read
Incorporate clear call-to-action elements. Tell people what to do and why they should. “Contact Us” is a good starting point, and “Get a free report” gives them a reason.

User Feedback and Interaction for Principles of Website Design

Don’t overlook the importance of call-to-actions (CTAs) that function well on mobile sites. You want to ensure they are easy to use and see and click on, especially with mobile devices’ smaller screen sizes.

Also, consider placing submission forms above the fold—above the portion where users have to scroll to see more. This will help ensure better functionality and allow users to act quickly when they are most interested.

How to Apply These Website Design Principles

At SITESPRING, we provide you with the resources you need to build websites that perform. Here’s the simple facts:

Your website design will directly impact conversion.
Good designs take Google standards into consideration.
Your website needs to fit your branding. It needs to help visitors know who you are and what you offer.
It needs to provide basic functionality that ensures clear support for the target audience landing on it.
It needs to provide information that can be easily found and understood so the user can make a decision.
It needs to encourage users to take the action that you wish they would take.

You can certainly learn these details yourself. In fact, we teach our clients why we encourage various designs and what the implications of one style or another are. Learning and applying these strategies is an important component of building a successful online presence.

We also know our clients well. Most don’t have the time to keep up with these areas and ensure they meet ADA compliance requirements. We can help with all aspects of these and other website design principles, and we apply the principles of good website design to every project.

Contact SITESPRING to learn more about our web design and development tools. Let our digital marketing agency help your site perform as expected, driving leads to your business and allowing branding.

FAQs About SEO Marketing Tools

What are the core principles of good website design?

Good website design principles include clarity of purpose, intuitive navigation, responsive layouts, fast load times, accessible content, and visual hierarchy. These principles help create user-friendly, engaging, and high-performing websites that convert visitors into customers.

Why is responsive design important for modern websites?

Responsive design ensures that your website functions well on all device types—from desktops to smartphones. Since over 50% of users browse and shop using mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly design is essential for usability, SEO rankings, and user retention.

How does website design impact SEO and search rankings?

Website design affects SEO through page speed, mobile responsiveness, user experience, and content structure. A well-designed site that loads fast, is easy to navigate, and follows accessibility guidelines tends to rank higher on Google, increasing visibility and traffic.

What role does content play in website design?

Content is a crucial component of website design. Clear, concise, and engaging content helps users understand your services and brand. When paired with effective layout and design elements, good content keeps users on your site longer and encourages conversions.

How can Sitespring help improve my website design?

Sitespring specializes in creating high-converting, user-centered websites. By following proven principles of website design, they ensure that your website is visually appealing, functional, accessible, and optimized for search engines—helping you drive traffic and generate leads.