Website design is an art in and of itself. Consequently, it’s subject to the perpetual question of form over function. What matters more? The aesthetics of a site or its technical capabilities?
Many businesses might look to consumer sentiment as a guiding light, but even their preferences paint a mixed picture–50% say that their impression of a business depends on the design of their website, and 42% share that they would abandon a website due to poor functionality. The tension between search engine optimization (SEO) and website design that prioritizes visual flair and user experience, thankfully, doesn’t have to be a binary choice.
Throughout this comprehensive guide, featuring insights from Mike Strahan, Intellibright’s Director of Design & Development, we’ll detail how to strike the perfect balance between SEO-friendly web design and aesthetics. Whether you’re launching a site from scratch or refreshing an existing one, aligning your design process with SEO strategy ensures that your site performs well and looks great.
Key Takeaways
- Businesses don’t have to choose between SEO and aesthetics, but they do need to plan early and align teams to avoid costly trade-offs.
- Design decisions like unclear content hierarchy, oversized media, or hidden sections can quietly damage performance and visibility in search.
- Over-optimizing for SEO can make websites harder to use, especially on mobile, where rigid layouts and keyword-stuffed content can hurt trust and usability.
- High-performing websites prioritize collaboration, performance benchmarks, and the right tools to support both discoverability and user experience over time.
What Makes a Well-Designed Website in 2025?
In 2025, a well-designed website is one that, visually, technically, and experientially, performs across the board. The best sites attract visitors through optimized SEO, offer a clear and intuitive user experience, and reflect a brand’s identity while supporting business goals without compromising usability.
For businesses, having a well-designed website is non-negotiable. Recent research underscores just how critical design has become: companies reported that customers spent 84% more time on their websites after design improvements, and shared that their online revenue grew by 132% as a result of site optimizations.
Navigating the Tension Between Design and Discoverability
Many of the elements that make a site visually impressive–like in-page animations, high-fidelity images and video, or custom fonts–can hurt performance. Pages packed with these features may load slowly and make it harder for search engines to accurately crawl, process, and rank your content. On the other hand, SEO-friendly choices such as simplified layouts and minimal visual elements can sometimes make a site feel flat or impersonal.
“The best-ranking site might be painfully ugly, and the most beautiful site might be completely unfindable,” Strahan said. “The goal isn’t to choose one over the other, it’s to understand where the trade-offs are.”
Striking the right balance starts with awareness: knowing which design choices can quietly wreck your SEO and which technical optimizations risk dulling aesthetics and UX. Let’s examine the most common pitfalls on both sides of the coin and highlight quick fixes and best practices to achieve the perfect equilibrium.
Design Choices That Hinder SEO
Even the most visually stunning websites can struggle to rank if certain design decisions compromise performance or crawlability. Below are some common design mistakes that undermine SEO-friendly web design and practical ways to resolve them without sacrificing style.
Lack of Clear Content Hierarchy
Just because content looks organized on a page doesn’t mean it actually is. Many sites rely on bold fonts or styled text to appear structured, but skip the underlying HTML that helps search engines make sense of the page. Without proper tags for headings, paragraphs, and lists, a page might look polished but lack the semantic clarity needed for search engines to understand what’s important.
To fix this, use proper HTML formatting: one H1 for the main page title, H2s and H3s to break down supporting sections, and proper paragraph tags for body content. When structure and styling align, your content becomes easier to read for both search engines and audiences.
Excessive Use of Large Media
High-quality videos, photos, and other striking visual elements can engage users but often drag down performance, which directly affects search engine rankings and user experience. While the average mobile web page takes about 15 seconds to load, most users won’t wait that long. In fact, research shows that 53% of visitors will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
“Page weight should stay under 5MB whenever possible, and individual image files work best under 500KB. One video per page is usually a solid upper limit. Embedding videos through platforms like YouTube helps reduce server strain,” Strahan said. “Choosing formats like WebP or AVIF gives you high visual quality at smaller file sizes. Visual content should feel intentional, not excessive. A fast site with focused media creates stronger engagement than one overloaded with assets.”
Burying Key Content
Tucking important information into tabs, dropdowns, or hover-triggered sections might help clean up a site’s visual layout, but they can hurt discoverability. If search engines can’t access product descriptions, FAQs, or keyword-rich content that’s hidden behind user interactions, that content may not get indexed.
This can lead to reduced keyword relevance, fewer ranking opportunities, and ultimately, lost conversions. This doesn’t mean you should forsake using dropdowns or toggles to streamline design, but it is important to keep things SEO-friendly by keeping essential content visible by default whenever possible.
Leveraging Layouts That Hamper Discoverability
Some layout choices may look modern and engaging, but they can unintentionally make it harder for search engines to crawl your site and for users to navigate it. Infinite scroll, for example, is a popular design layout that loads content dynamically as users scroll down pages. But if it’s not implemented carefully, search engines may never reach the additional content, which means fewer pages get indexed and ranked.
These issues aren’t limited to infinite scroll. Sites with buried navigation, broken internal linking, or pages hidden behind complex interactions can all reduce visibility in search engine results. To avoid this, make sure important pages are easy to find through clear navigation menus, consistent internal links, and site structures that prioritize accessibility for both bots and humans.
SEO Mistakes That Sabotage Design and UX
Optimizing too heavily for SEO can unravel a site’s design and drastically impact user experience. Here are some common SEO missteps that prioritize search engines at the expense of audiences and how to avoid them.
Keyword Stuffing
One of the most common SEO missteps is keyword stuffing: repeating the same phrases across headlines, CTAs, and body copy. You’ve probably seen it before. A page title might say something like “Affordable SEO Website Design for SEO Web Optimization,” or a button might read “Click Here for SEO Web Design Services” instead of something simple like “Get a Quote.” These types of phrases feel unnatural, take up space, and can make users question the credibility of your business.
To avoid this, prioritize natural language and user intent. Use keywords where they fit organically, especially in headings and key messaging, but never at the expense of tone or flow. Effective SEO web design is created for people first, not search engines, and it rewards content that sounds human, not manufactured.
Overlooking Mobile Experiences
Many websites focus heavily on hitting SEO “checklist” items–like adding keyword-rich headings, large blocks of opening text, and metadata–without considering how those elements translate and function on mobile devices. Visual elements that look clean and structured on desktops can quickly become cluttered or difficult to use on smaller screens. A large headline, for example, might take up too much space on a phone screen, creating unnecessary friction and making it harder for users to quickly find what they’re looking for.
“Google uses the mobile version of your site to decide how it shows up in search results. That makes layout choices on smaller screens just as important as anything that would appear on a desktop,” Strahan said. “I’ve worked with teams that saw a clear lift in conversions once they focused on how key elements showed up on mobile, especially call buttons, forms, and product details. Those changes made the site easier to use and easier to find.”
Relying on Rigid Page Layouts
To scale content quickly, many businesses rely on rigid templates that repeat the same layout across multiple pages. These templates are often chosen because they follow SEO best practices by default, prioritizing things like heading structure, internal linking, and other formatting. While this can improve consistency and efficiency, it often flattens the user experience.
When every page looks and feels the same, users disengage. It becomes harder to highlight what matters, and brand personality is pushed aside. Use templates as a starting point, but leave room for flexibility. Let the content drive the design, not just the SEO framework.
Overloading Pages with Unnecessary Content
Some websites attempt to boost SEO by adding long introductions, generic FAQs, or filler sections that don’t offer real value. While additional content can support rankings when it’s relevant, unnecessary sections often get in the way. They push important information farther down the page, break the visual flow, and make it harder for users to find what they’re looking for. Focus on what matters. Every element on a page should support a user goal. If content doesn’t do that, it’s more likely to hurt performance than help it.
How to Practically Balance SEO and Aesthetics
The most effective websites are shaped by shared goals, thoughtful planning, and systems that support both visibility and engagement. Here are four practical ways to make that happen.
1. Align SEO and Design Teams from the Start
Bringing SEO and design together at the start of a project ensures that your site isn’t just visually impressive, but also built to perform. When both teams are involved in planning before content is outlined or layouts are developed, you avoid last-minute changes that waste time, budget, and creative energy. SEO specialists can flag technical needs like page hierarchy and metadata, while designers can advocate for brand storytelling and user experience.
2. Define Performance Benchmarks During the Design Phase
Without clear benchmarks, it’s easy for design choices to unintentionally hurt performance. Load times get longer, mobile layouts break, and SEO takes a back seat to visual polish. Performance benchmarks give everyone a target to work toward. They help guide decisions around layout, content hierarchy, image formats, and interaction design, long before teams start testing for speed or crawlability.
“Google Core Web Vitals are a strong starting point. These include First Input Delay, which measures how quickly a visitor can begin interacting with a site; Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which tracks how fast the main content loads; and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which monitors visual stability during loading,” Strahan said. “Lighthouse is a tool built into Chrome that generates a score based on performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices. It also provides step-by-step suggestions for improving those scores. To go deeper, teams can review page load metrics such as domain lookup time, HTML download time, and total request count. These metrics help identify slowdowns related to hosting, server response, or page complexity.”
3. Create Ongoing Workflows for Collaboration
Websites constantly evolve to fit the needs of businesses and customers. New pages get added, layouts shift, and content updates roll out over time. Without a clear workflow that keeps SEO and design in sync after launch, even small changes can create new problems. Creating a shared process for updates helps design and SEO teams stay aligned, catch issues early, and maintain site performance as the website changes.
4. Use Tools That Improve SEO Without Limiting Design
Some tools help businesses catch technical issues while still supporting strong design and user experience. For example, Google PageSpeed Insights can show if your site loads too slowly on mobile, and Web.dev highlights problems like oversized images or layout shifts. If you’re using a platform like WordPress, plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math can make it easier to manage page titles, descriptions, and search previews without needing a developer. Some tools also compress images automatically and help ensure your site is accessible on different devices and screen sizes.
The Best Sites Are Balanced, Not Perfect
Great websites are built through planning, collaboration, and a willingness to make thoughtful trade-offs. Teams that align early, work from shared goals, and stay focused on performance and usability build sites that look sharp and rank well.
“Different websites have different goals. Portfolios, for example, often showcase creative work, so the design needs to highlight visuals and feel highly polished,” Strahan said. “An e-commerce site focuses on driving purchases, so the layout should make it easy for customers to learn about products and check out without unnecessary friction. That’s why it’s so important to take a balanced approach to website design – there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.”
At Intellibright, we help businesses unify SEO strategy and design to build high-performing websites. Our team combines search expertise with conversion-focused design to create sites that attract visitors, engage users, and drive results. Whether you’re starting from scratch or optimizing an existing site, we streamline strategy, performance, and user experience into one cohesive process.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can businesses improve SEO without compromising design?
Start by aligning SEO and creative teams early in the planning process. When technical requirements and brand goals are considered from the beginning, teams can make smarter design choices, like using clean content structure, optimized media, and responsive layouts, that support both visibility and user experience.
What design decisions are most likely to hurt search performance?
Heavy media, confusing layouts, and hidden content can all drag down performance. For example, large background videos or poorly structured pages often slow load speed or disrupt content hierarchy, which makes it harder for search engines to crawl and rank pages effectively.
Why is mobile experience so important for SEO today?
Google uses the mobile version of a site as the primary version for indexing and ranking. If a site looks great on desktop but is hard to use on a phone, it may see lower rankings and higher bounce rates.
Should all pages follow the same SEO template or structure?
Not necessarily. Templates can improve consistency, but using the same layout across every page can flatten user experience and limit creativity. Instead, businesses should let content and user intent shape the page while still following technical best practices like clear headings, internal links, and fast load times.
What tools can businesses use to balance SEO and design more effectively?
Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Web.dev help identify performance issues. Content platforms like WordPress offer plugins like Yoast SEO to manage meta tags, structured data, and mobile formatting. These tools give teams visibility into how design impacts performance, helping them build sites that look sharp and rank well.