2025 Website Design Trends

I spent a long time this afternoon reading articles online about website design trends for 2025. Gleefully clicking away to my hearts delight, taking in the news and views of a range of experts to get a sense of what’s hot and what’s not this year.

My hope however, to pull together a natty like article for you all summarising a broader view of the handful of trends for the year ahead was very quickly dashed. Within reading the first five articles, I counted over 60 different trends.

It seems 2025 is a veritable smorgasbord of design styles.

Stop little pot, stop

During my research many of the website design trends got me excited.

Trends that just sound full bodied and make you a little bit tingly when you roll the words around ‘tactile maximalism’, ‘dopamine colours’ ‘slow design’ (thanks to WIX)… or trends just brimming with 90’s esque vibes… ‘glow effects’ and ‘flash-era nostalgia’ (thanks to Webflow) which all sound very cool.

Digital sustainability, featured in multiple articles, alongside voice search and AI generated imagery (cue the energy efficiency discussion). 

Expect earthy colour palettes that dial into the Pantone Colour of the Year Mocha Mouse 17-1230.

My harsher side would have challenged some of the trends listed, like White Space and Full Page Headers. Both have already been knocking about for some time and whilst I do not argue they are still in vogue, I would not pitch them as an emerging trend for 2025.

Let’s be honest, White Space is more of a website design classic, one that gently ebbs and flows amongst the more rapidly changing trends than tend to come and go again.

Sense and sensibility

Braver, bolder articles, put forward smaller, tightly knitted, trend lists. 

I really liked Michal Malewicz’s take on Medium, who sees 2025 being very visual, full of bento grids and conversion focused traditional structures.

Gone it seems are the days of crazy overwhelming flicky design and navigation stuffed so full you get lost within seconds of entering the website, never to return again. 

Instead he positions a “…website should be functional, easy to navigate, easy to understand and beautiful. In that order.”  Here! Here!

Personally, I would heartily support a return to the fundamentals of good design. Function, performance and simplicity with beauty, sitting at the heart of each creation. 

Fundamentals, which really, should never have gone out of fashion. 

We must not forget the humans who need to use our websites, or the raison d’être for the website’s existence – profile raising, engagement, generating revenue (sales or donations) or all these great things.

A gorgeous, striking website achieves nothing if you are not able to connect and transact with it. So a website must not only look great, but work well, be efficient, slick, fast and easy to use. A joyful experience.

So as Malwicz says, lets make “performance.. the primary metric for 2025”.

Efficient, high performing websites also tend to tick many of the sustsainable boxes. Win win.

I would also add, all websites should also work well for the “forgotten audience” the internal team creating, editing and publishing the content. AI may have opened doors for content creation, to the best of my knowledge, it has yet to replace the good old CMS admin system to actually get the words out there.

The experience should be seamless from end to end, for each and every user.

Digital metamorphosis

Stepping back and considering why we are faced with so many website design trends, I think we have to first acknowledge some of the undercurrents that propel this wealth of choice and creativity.

Brands are changing. Audiences and demographics are evolving at pace. Brands need to keep up, dial into and embrace their uniqueness so they can forge an authentic voice.

So it is no surprise, that in response we are in a period of great creativity, expansion, discovery and experimentation, where design structures are being played with and broken, bent out of shape, twisted, teased, painted neon and put back upside down as part of the website design process.

After all, when we talk of beauty, we must remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Not all websites will be beautiful to all people. What is key is that they resonate with the audiences they are intended for.

Purposeful brands are excelling. As are human centric ones. Both purposeful brands and human centric ones, get that at the root of all things, is connection. For me that should be the biggest website trend of all in 2025.

Whatever your website looks like, it should be simple, easy to use, designed well, perform well but at the end of the day, it needs to bring you closer to your audiences and customers, help you forge kinetic digital relationships and long lasting brand connections.