TL;DR
- Chasing design trends does damage, but not for the reason the industry usually gives. The problem is rarely novelty.
- It is complexity. The research on first impressions is blunt about which pages people warm to, and busy is not it.
- Trends also arrive at everyone else's site at the same time, so the differentiation you paid for evaporates within a season.
- Credibility turns out to rest on four fairly boring factors, none of which a redesign fixes.
Every eighteen months the web agrees on a new look. Oversized type, then brutalism, then glassmorphism, then whatever the design awards are rewarding this year. Businesses redesign to keep up, and a proportion of them come out the other side with a site that performs worse than the one they replaced. The usual explanation is that trends are shallow. The more useful explanation is more specific than that.
The problem is complexity, not novelty
The most relevant evidence here works against half of what agencies say about trends. Tuch and colleagues, publishing in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in 2012, tested 119 real websites and found that the most positive first impressions came from low visual complexity combined with high prototypicality — pages that were simple, and that looked like what people expected that kind of page to look like. The effect was measurable at 17 milliseconds.
Most trend-driven redesigns move in exactly the wrong direction on the first of those. Layered gradients, overlapping cards, scroll-triggered motion, full-bleed video, a hero that reveals itself in three stages: each is a small increase in what the eye has to resolve before it knows where to look. Individually defensible. Collectively, a busier page than the one you started with.
The trend did not cost you trust because it was fashionable. It cost you trust because it added things to look at.
This also explains why the same trend works for one business and fails for another. A design studio’s site can afford visual complexity because the complexity is the portfolio. A commercial cleaning company’s cannot, because every second the visitor spends decoding the layout is a second not spent finding the phone number.
The differentiation expires faster than the build
The second cost is that trends are, by definition, arriving everywhere at once. The scale of that is easy to underestimate: W3Techs put WordPress alone on 40.7% of all websites and 58.9% of the content management system market when it surveyed in September 2026. A trend that reaches the popular theme and page-builder ecosystems is on tens of thousands of sites within a year, including your competitors’.
So the distinctiveness you commissioned has a shelf life measured in months, while the build cost, the retraining and the content migration do not. Two years later you have a site that looks dated in a specific and identifiable way — which is worse than looking plain, because it dates you precisely.
What people are actually judging
It is worth being clear about what credibility rests on, because it is not the thing most redesign budgets are spent on. Aurora Harley, writing for the Nielsen Norman Group in 2016, set out four factors: design quality, up-front disclosure, comprehensive and current content, and connection to the rest of the web. Design quality is one of the four, and it is defined as looking legitimate and professional with well-organised navigation — not as looking current.
The other three are all content and honesty problems. Typos, broken links and small mistakes, Harley noted, degrade credibility quickly because they signal a general lack of attention. No trend fixes any of that, and a rushed redesign usually makes it worse for a few months while everyone finds the pages that got left behind.
- Say your prices, or your price bands, or why you cannot
- Put a real address, real names and real photographs of your own work on the site
- Date your content, and remove what has gone stale rather than leaving it to rot
- Fix the broken links and the dead form before commissioning anything
The bill nobody budgets for
There is a further cost to trend-led design, and it lands on the people least able to absorb it. In its 2026 report, the WebAIM Million found detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of the top 1,000,000 home pages, averaging 56.1 errors per page — up from 94.8% the year before. Those are automatically detectable failures only, so the real figure is worse, not better.
Low-contrast text, decorative buttons with no accessible label, motion that cannot be turned off and hero images carrying the only copy on the page are all recognisable as design choices somebody made deliberately, in pursuit of a look. Getting this right is not a compliance chore bolted on at the end; it is mostly a set of constraints that also happen to reduce complexity, which is where this article started.
Been shown a redesign concept and cannot tell whether it helps or just looks current? We are happy to say which.
A test before you adopt the next one
None of this is an argument for a website that never changes. It is an argument for a decision rule, so that the answer is not simply whichever option looked best in the presentation.
Worth adopting when
- It removes something from the page rather than adding to it
- It solves a problem your own visitors have demonstrably had
- It survives being viewed on a mid-range phone in daylight
- You can still describe what the business does in the first screenful
Leave it when
- The only reason is that a competitor or an awards site has it
- It moves navigation somewhere people will have to look for it
- It needs new JavaScript to do something a static layout already did
- The team cannot explain what it improves without using the word "modern"
Applied honestly, that rule kills most trends and keeps a few. The ones it keeps tend to be the quiet structural ones — better type scales, more generous spacing, clearer focus states — which nobody notices and everybody benefits from. The ones it kills are the ones that photograph well.
Good to know
FAQs
No. The useful test is whether the trend removes something from the page or adds to it. Research on first impressions is consistently unkind to visual complexity, so a trend that simplifies is usually safe and a trend that layers is usually not.
Less often than most agencies suggest, and never as the answer to a business problem you have not diagnosed. Broken links, stale content and unclear pricing damage credibility more than an unfashionable layout, and none of them need a redesign.
Looking plain matters much less than looking careless. A simple, well-maintained site with real photography and current content reads as more credible than a stylish one with a dead contact form.
Most often because it added visual complexity, moved familiar things somewhere unfamiliar, or lost content in the migration. Those are diagnosable, and usually fixable without starting again.
Squarely in the middle of it. Most accessibility failures on modern sites are design choices — low contrast, unlabelled controls, motion that cannot be stopped — made in pursuit of a look. Fixing them generally simplifies the page, which helps everyone.
Next step
Thinking about a redesign?
We work with businesses across Brighton and London, and we will tell you when the problem is the content rather than the design.