TL;DR
- Seven faults turn up again and again on otherwise competent websites. None of them are matters of taste.
- They cost the visitor one of three things: effort, time, or the transaction itself.
- They persist because none of them are visible in the thing that gets approved. A page can commit all seven and still look perfectly professional in a screenshot.
- Five of the seven can be checked in an afternoon by someone with no design training at all.
Every agency has a list like this, and most of them are lists of things the author finds ugly. This one is not. Each of these seven costs the visitor something measurable — the work they have to do, the time they have to wait, or the purchase they abandon — and each one can be checked without an opinion about typography.
The interesting question is the one in the title. These are not obscure faults. So why is almost every site still committing several of them?
The sins that make people work too hard
1. Clutter
A page with four competing focal points has no focal point. Visitors do not carefully weigh the options; they scan, fail to find the one thing they came for, and leave.
This is one of the few design questions with reasonably hard evidence behind it. Tuch and colleagues, writing in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in 2012, tested 119 real websites and found that low visual complexity — along with high prototypicality, meaning a page that looks like what people expect that kind of page to look like — produced the most positive first impressions, with the effect detectable at 17 milliseconds. Simple and conventional wins. Busy and inventive loses, and it loses before anyone has read anything.
2. Navigation that has to be decoded
Menus written in the language of the org chart rather than the language of the customer. “Solutions”, “Capabilities”, “Our Approach” — labels that mean something internally and nothing at all to a stranger trying to work out whether you cover their area.
There is no clever fix. Name things what they are, keep the top level short enough to take in at a glance, and test the labels on someone who has never seen your website before. If they hesitate, the label is wrong, no matter how well it tested in the workshop.
3. Walls of text
Long paragraphs of undifferentiated prose, usually written to satisfy an internal stakeholder rather than a reader.
Jakob Nielsen at Nielsen Norman Group, analysing 45,237 page views back in 2008, concluded that on the average web page users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit, and that 20% is the more likely figure. It is an old study and the web has changed since, but nothing about reader patience has changed in the generous direction. If the point of the page is in the fourth paragraph, it is not in the page at all.
Assume a quarter of your words will be read, and choose which quarter.
The sins that make people wait
4. A slow page
Speed is the sin with the clearest link to money, which makes it the strangest one to keep committing. Google publishes the pass mark: its Core Web Vitals guidance asks for a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, all at the 75th percentile of real page loads.
The value of clearing that bar is documented. In Milliseconds Make Millions, research commissioned by Google and run by 55 and Deloitte across 37 brands, a 0.1 second improvement in mobile site speed moved 3.2% more retail shoppers from listing to product page and 9.1% more from product page to basket, with retail spend up 9.2% and travel bookings up 10%. That is retail and travel data on mobile, so do not stretch it to every sector — but a tenth of a second is a very small amount of engineering for that kind of movement.
5. Silence when you act
You tap a button. Nothing appears to happen. So you tap it again, and now you have two enquiries, or an error, or you have given up. This is not a cosmetic issue: the Google metric for it, Interaction to Next Paint, has a “good” threshold of 200 milliseconds or less precisely because the gap between an action and a visible response is where confidence drains away.
The remedy is unglamorous. Every interactive element should change visibly the instant it is pressed, before whatever it triggers has finished. A spinner, a disabled state, a colour change — anything that says the machine heard you.
The sins that lose the sale
6. Mobile as an afterthought — or desktop as one
The old sin was designing on a large screen and squeezing the result onto a phone. The new one is designing for a phone and treating the desktop layout as a stretched version of it. Both come from the same mistake, which is deciding in advance which screen matters.
StatCounter put mobile at 49.36% of global web traffic in August 2026, desktop at 49.11% and tablets at 1.54%. That is as close to an even split as makes no difference. Both layouts are the real website and both deserve the same review.
7. Forms that ask for everything
Every field is a small negotiation, and each one gives the visitor another reason to stop. Marketing wants company size; sales wants a phone number; someone wants to know how they heard about you. None of it is needed to answer the enquiry.
The clearest evidence here is from ecommerce, and it should be read as such. Baymard Institute puts the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, averaged across 50 separate studies. That is a checkout figure and it does not transfer directly to a contact form on a brochure site — but it is a useful reminder that abandonment at the point of commitment is the norm, not the exception, and that every additional demand you make at that moment is expensive.
Ask for what you need to reply, and nothing else. You can find out the rest in the conversation you have just earned.
So why do they still exist everywhere?
Because not one of these seven is visible in the artefact that gets approved.
Websites are signed off from a design — a picture, usually on a large screen, in a meeting, with no visitors present. A picture cannot be slow. A picture cannot fail to respond to a tap. A picture cannot show you that the fourth paragraph is where the point was. And the evidence on first impressions is actively unhelpful here: a conventional, uncluttered page is judged well within milliseconds, so a site can be committing five of these sins and still look entirely reassuring to the people approving it.
Checks that catch these seven
- Five strangers attempting one real task while you watch
- A performance measurement on a mid-range phone, on mobile data
- Reading only the first screen and asking what it tells a stranger
- Navigating the whole site with the Tab key
- Counting the fields on every form and justifying each one
Checks that never will
- A design presentation on a large office monitor
- Internal stakeholders who already know where everything is
- A brand review of colours and typefaces
- A content sign-off read on paper
- "Does everyone like it?"
If you want proof that invisible faults survive review at scale, look at accessibility. The WebAIM Million survey for 2026 found detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of the top one million home pages, averaging 56.1 errors per page — and those are only the errors automated tooling can find. Nearly every large, well-resourced, professionally built site on the web is failing checks that a free tool can run in seconds. Not because nobody cares, but because nothing in the approval process ever asked.
Which is the real lesson of the list. These are not design failures. They are review failures. Change what you check before launch and most of them stop happening.
Good to know
FAQs
Whichever one your visitors are hitting most. In practice that usually means speed and clarity of the first screen, because they affect every visitor to every page rather than only the ones who reach a form.
Most of it. Run your page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights for the performance thresholds, open the site on your own phone away from the office network, tap a few buttons and watch whether anything responds immediately, and count the fields on your contact form.
For the first impression, the research points that way — low complexity and familiar layouts are judged most favourably, and very fast. Distinctiveness earns its money later, when a visitor is comparing you against two competitors and needs a reason to pick one.
Then the problem is probably not on this list. Look at what the page asks people to do and whether it is the thing they came to do — a technically excellent page can still be selling the wrong step at the wrong moment.
Next step
Not sure how many of the seven your site is committing?
We audit websites for businesses across Brighton and London, and we will tell you which faults are actually costing you something.