Why boring websites win more work

Boring websites win more work because the person landing on one can tell in a few seconds what you do and what to do next, and the page has loaded before they’ve given up. That’s most of website design that converts. Clear words first, then speed, then a button that works, and the pretty bits get whatever time’s left.

I’ve been designing websites for over twenty years, so yes, this is me slagging off my own trade. Every time I’ve watched a business spend months on the look of a website, it’s come out of the time that should have gone on the bits that bring in enquiries.

What do I mean by boring?

Conventional. The menu’s where you expect it. The headline says what you do, in the words your customers use. There’s one button and it says what happens when you press it, like “Book a consultation”. Nothing slides in from the left, there’s no video playing behind the text, and nobody has commissioned custom illustrations of the team as cartoon owls.

It can still look good. I’m not asking anybody to go back to something that looks like it was built in 1997. Looking good just gets the last slice of the time and money, after everything else is sorted.

“Have you seen your own website, Craig?”

Yes. Ours has adverts you can throw across the screen, a vending machine, a fruit machine that tells you our prices and a game hidden in it somewhere. I’m aware of the irony.

We sell websites, so our website is the thing we’re selling. Somebody choosing a web designer wants to see what we can do, and the best evidence we’ve got is our own site, so it has to stand out from every other agency’s. A plumber’s website has a different job. Nobody picks a plumber because the ads on their homepage bounce.

Underneath the noise, it follows the checklist further down this post. The headline says what we do, the prices are on it, the button says “Start your project”, and it loads quickly on a rubbish phone and still works with JavaScript switched off. The daft stuff went on after all that was sorted, which is the order I’d do it in for anyone.

The website that never launched

We had a client come to us last year. I’ll call them ABC Solutions, which obviously isn’t their name.

They’d spent six months working with an in-house designer on a new website, and it looked stunning. Lovely colour scheme, custom illustrations, animations everywhere. It also wasn’t live. Every time they got close, somebody wondered whether the blue should be a bit more teal, or whether the font was too modern, or whether they needed another page about their company values. (You never needed the first page about your company values.)

So they asked us to finish it off. I looked at it and told them I wasn’t finishing it, we’d be starting again from scratch. They weren’t happy.

My reasons were dull. Nobody looking at it could tell what the business did. The call to action was hidden at the bottom of the page. And all those animations meant it took six seconds to load.

So we built them a boring one. A big clear headline, three bullet points underneath saying what they do, a few testimonials and a button that said “Book a consultation”, all at the top of the homepage. No animations, no parallax, no illustrations.

In the first week it brought in three leads. Doesn’t sound like much until you remember that’s three more than they’d had in the six months they’d spent polishing the other one. Week two brought five more. Once they started running ads to it, it was bringing in about 30 a month, roughly a lead a day.

▶Play the video: Stop designing your website. Do this instead.

What do visitors want from your website?

Two things. Can you solve my problem, and what do I do next?

They aren’t admiring your shade of blue. They’re working out whether you can help, and if your website doesn’t make that obvious quickly, they hit back and click the next result on Google. They don’t come back.

I use a test for this that I call, not very imaginatively, the 10-second test. Open your homepage, set a timer for 10 seconds and pretend you’ve never heard of the business. When the timer goes, can you say what the business does and who it’s for, and do you know what to click? If you can’t, the website’s too clever for its own good.

I’ve gone through what belongs on a homepage in more detail in what should go on a homepage, so I won’t repeat it all here.

Clear, fast, functional, pretty

This is the checklist we use on every website we build, in this order:

1. Clear. Does it say what you do and what to do next?
2. Fast. Does it load in a couple of seconds?
3. Functional. Can people book a call or fill in the form, or do whatever it is you want them to do, without a fight?
4. Pretty. Does it look nice?

Pretty’s fourth. Most businesses spend about 80% of their time on number four. Flip it round, put 80% into the first three and spend the other 20% making it look decent.

Here’s what the first three look like on real projects. None of it would get a designer excited.

Clear. Rucklidge Law are family solicitors in Barnsley. Their old website was an off-the-shelf template full of stock photos and legal jargon, with hardly a call to action anywhere. We rewrote every headline to answer “what’s in it for me?”, cut the menu down to services and fees, published the fees, and ran one call to action through the whole site: “Book your free 30-minute consultation now”. Conversion rates are up by as much as 35%, and the site loads in about two seconds, down from six.

Fast. Wolf Laundry were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting no leads at all. Their website took ten seconds to load, and more than half the people they’d paid to send there gave up before it appeared. We rebuilt it and it loads in about a second now. They had 30 to 60 leads a month within weeks of launch, and it’s 150 to 200 a month now, on the same ad budget.

Functional. The Business Village in Barnsley is a building full of offices to rent. Its website talked about office space at length and never told you how to rent one, so we added a button that said “Book a tour”. That was it. Glasscraft make glass, and their trade customers used to ring up to find out where their order was. We wired the website into their manufacturing system so customers can check for themselves. It gets used 100 to 200 times a month, which is 100 to 200 phone calls the team doesn’t have to take. Nobody’s ever called an order tracker beautiful.

Pretty. Even this bit can be boring. Rucklidge Law swapped the stock photos for photos of their actual team. Glasscraft’s website doesn’t have a single stock photo on it, just their own people and their own factories. That does more for somebody deciding whether to trust you than any amount of gradient.

Why do pretty websites keep getting built?

Because the person signing off the website is the boss, and the boss looks at it far more than any customer ever will.

Then it all disappears down a hole. Should the button be blue or green? Is this font too corporate? Does this grey match the brand guidelines? Should we have parallax scrolling? (No. Never. I’ll die on that hill.) Before you know it you’re on revision 47, you’ve shown it to your mate Dave who knows a bit about websites, and the colour scheme’s changed four times.

Meanwhile a competitor with an uglier website launched theirs ages ago, and it works, so they’re getting your enquiries.

What gets me about the animations and video backgrounds is that you pay for them twice. They eat months of design time, and then they slow the page down for every single visitor. Every animation, video and massive image is more for somebody’s phone to load on a dodgy signal, and slow websites don’t convert.

Launch it before you think it’s ready

If the website is clear and fast and the call to action works, put it live. Today, ideally.

Every day it isn’t live is a day it isn’t bringing in enquiries. You can change the button colour later, or A/B test it to death once there’s real data to test with. You can’t learn anything from a website nobody can see.

I’ve had clients take two or three years to launch because it didn’t feel ready. Was the website much different at three years than it was at three months? No. It was older, built on older tech, and already looking a bit tired the day it went live.

If yours is live and the phone’s still quiet, the checks in why is my website not getting enquiries? will tell you where to look first. And if you want to see what boring looks like when it’s done properly, it’s all on our work page. Most of it just looks fine, which is the idea.