17 Web Design Pet Peeves to Avoid

Scroll Hijacking Hinders User Experience

One of the most damaging trends in web design I see a lot today is scroll hijacking, i.e., when a site overrides the user’s natural scroll behavior to force a curated visual experience.

We’ve worked with multiple SaaS companies in the past year who came in with beautiful websites that completely underperformed. In one case, users had to sit through a 10-second animation just to see the headline. The bounce rate was over 70%, and hardly anyone reached the CTA.

We redesigned the experience for speed and clarity, removing the locked scroll, surfacing the value proposition up-top, and giving users full control over their navigation. Within weeks, their conversions doubled.

The key takeaway? Nine out of ten visitors on your website aren’t there to be ‘impressed’ – but to quickly validate whether your product solves their problems.

Good design isn’t about slowing people down, but giving them momentum. Sure, scroll hijacking feels like storytelling, but in practice, it disrupts decision-making, a trade-off that almost never pays off.

Excessive Fade-In Transitions Slow Navigation

My biggest pet peeve when it comes to web design is when every single block of text or image has a fade-in transition as you scroll down the page. A lot of Squarespace templates use this trend. Sure, it fades in within a few milliseconds, but it makes scrolling feel laggy and it makes skimming down the page more cumbersome. I think animations are a great way to draw attention to important pieces of information on the page, but when used excessively, they can quickly turn into an annoyance.

Prioritize Accessibility with High-Contrast Text

Not enough color contrast with text. It feels like half the internet has a vendetta against black and white, and defaults to low-contrast combinations or white text over a busy image. Creativity is important, but accessibility and readability should come first. WCAG contrast ratios exist for a reason: people with visual impairments, color blindness, or even just browsing in a bright room need high-contrast text to actually read the content. Black or white text isn’t “corporate” or “boring”—it’s versatile and easy on the eyes. Low-contrast typography is a trend that needs to disappear.

Flashy Effects Impede Site Functionality

What design trend do you most hope will be out of fashion next year? Homepage featuring too much parallax scrolling! And too many animations like the tremble and waving of some design elements of the site, for the looks of it and not so much for the representation of its contents and how the site works. A lot of these flashy effects can make people sick to their stomachs, slow load times, and present obstacles for users with cognitive disabilities or old devices.

We are continually working with clients whose sites are using loads of fancy scrolling animations, spinning charts, and crazy transition effects that look sexy on the $2000 Mac but render quite poorly when observed on anything other than a high-end machine or smartphone. For example, one client of ours from the professional services industry had a website that loaded in 8 seconds and featured so many moving components that visitors had a hard time figuring out how the client actually could be of service. The overselling and overuse of visual effects eclipsed the skill set and made navigation difficult.

The real issue with animation-loaded design is that it frequently exists more to populate the designer’s portfolio than fulfill the business’s goals, and often churns out websites that are so busy being pretty, they forget how to do their job! These visual distractions prevent users from accomplishing essential objectives, like hunting for contact information, scanning service descriptions, or deciding whether or not to buy. Webpages should enable users to consume content and complete their tasks, not present unnecessary visual complexity that distracts from a clear path towards business goals and puts user accessibility requirements at risk.

Optimize for Speed Over Visual Complexity

Running Exclusive Leads and building hundreds of websites, my biggest pet peeve is auto-playing videos and animations that slow down mobile load times. I’ve seen businesses lose massive traffic because their fancy hero videos take 8+ seconds to load on phones.

We tracked one client’s site that had an auto-playing background video – their bounce rate was 73% on mobile. After we removed it and optimized for speed, their mobile bounce rate dropped to 31% and their Google My Business calls increased from 23 to over 200 per month.

The trend I wish would die is websites that prioritize “looking cool” over actually converting visitors into customers. I constantly see service businesses with parallax scrolling and complex animations that make their contact forms load slowly or get buried below the fold.

Your website exists to get you leads, not win design awards. Every animation and fancy effect should have a clear purpose – if it doesn’t directly help visitors understand your service or contact you faster, it’s probably hurting your bottom line.

Eliminate Unnecessary Animations for Better UX

One of my biggest pet peeves in web design is excessive animations and auto-play “experiences” that have no purpose other than to be “cool.” I’m not saying that moderate and subtle motion can’t enhance UX, but there are too many websites that feel like a theme park experience for the user where text just slides in from random directions, background videos loop very loudly, and popups sneak up from all directions. This creates distracting experiences for the user, drastically increases time-to-load, and often takes away from accessibility for users with cognitive or visual disabilities.

I’d like to see one trend in web design disappear entirely: the infinite scroll homepage “experience”. This is marketed as modern and slick; however, it turns navigation into a guessing game. Users are not able to easily find the most important information, and search engines can’t index content well. Even worse, it emphasizes useless scrolling instead of useful engagement. A simple grid or modular layout with a clear hierarchy is often more efficient, quicker, and in fact more compelling instead of scrolling forever.

Design should guide and engage users, not tire them out. I hope there will be a reevaluation of production value, from flashy gimmicks, focusing instead on clarity, purpose, and usability. This is where every action, every hover effect, and every layout choice earns its existence rather than exists for the sake of looking good.

Custom Cursors Confuse and Slow Users

Custom cursors are the one design trend I’d happily see disappear tomorrow. They might look clever in a designer’s portfolio, but in real life, they’re clunky, confusing, and often slow the site down. At Webheads, we’ve worked on projects ranging from financial platforms like TradeStation to tourism brands like Golden Tours, and what really converts is clarity and speed, not gimmicks. A user wants to find what they came for, book a tour, or open an account, not spend three seconds trying to figure out why their cursor is now a giant circle or some trailing comet. Great web design should make the experience seamless: fast-loading pages, intuitive navigation, and clear calls to action. Custom cursors do the opposite, pulling focus away from the journey and creating unnecessary friction. They’re more of a designer’s indulgence than a user’s friend, and that’s why I’d be happy to see them retired from the web altogether.

Fake Scarcity Tactics Damage Long-Term Trust

For me, it’s when sites rely on fake scarcity tactics like endless ‘only 2 left!’ banners. I’ve audited websites where these tricks actually hurt long-term SEO because bounce rates skyrocketed from frustrated users. If you’re trying to build credibility, focus on transparency and strong product descriptions. They do more for both rankings and trust.

Countdown Timers Erode Brand Credibility

One of my biggest web design pet peeves is fake urgency timers on e-commerce sites. I remember landing on a store with a ‘5-minute-only’ countdown that magically reset every time I refreshed. It immediately broke my trust in the brand. Honestly, if you want lasting relationships, ditch these gimmicks and focus on value instead of manipulation.

Generic Hero Sections Fail to Engage

My biggest web design pet peeve is generic hero sections.

You’ve seen them before: the full-width stock photo of business people smiling or shaking hands, with a vague headline like “We drive innovation.” They’re forgettable and interchangeable. If the first thing on your site could belong to any company, it’s not doing its job.

A hero section is prime real estate. It should quickly tell visitors who you are and why you’re different, whether through bold, specific copy, real imagery, or a simple design choice that reflects your brand’s personality. When the hero feels authentic, the rest of the site instantly becomes more engaging.

Auto-Scrolling Banners Distract and Slow

My biggest web design pet peeve is top banners (sliders/carousels) that scroll automatically. They often slow down the site by loading multiple large images and distract users—switching too quickly to read or so slowly that visitors miss the additional slides. They rarely improve engagement and can hurt usability and speed. The one exception is an artistic or portfolio site, where the focus is showcasing work rather than driving conversions.

Chatbots Frustrate Users Seeking Human Help

Putting everything behind a chatbot is my worst pet peeve, and this is a hill I’m willing to die on.

I absolutely cannot stand when websites force you to go through a chatbot when you need actual human help. You have a specific question that isn’t covered in their FAQ, so you look for a contact form or phone number, but instead, there’s just “Chat with our AI assistant!”.

The bot asks what you need help with, you explain your situation, and then it just… sends you back to the same FAQ you already read. Or worse, it gives you some generic response that completely misses the point of what you’re asking.

It’s particularly maddening when you have a nuanced issue that requires actual understanding. The bot keeps trying to fit your problem into its predetermined categories, and when it can’t, it just loops back to unhelpful suggestions until your blood is boiling.

I’m aware that it saves companies money by filtering out simple questions, but it’s such a poor user experience when you genuinely need help with something specific. Sometimes you just need to talk to someone who can actually understand context and make decisions, not get bounced around by an AI that’s clearly just there to deflect support requests.

Having alternative contact methods if the chatbot is not doing what your customer needs it to do is so much better for a website user. It’s just good customer service, not to mention better web design.

Unskilled Web Design Hurts Industry Standards

My biggest pet peeve is people and companies that don’t actually know programming or design fundamentals engaging in web design. There are a large number of individuals and organizations who simply use WYSIWYG editors or platforms like WordPress, but lack any real coding skills or understanding of design principles. I feel that this practice hurts the industry as a whole and dilutes the public’s and clients’ expectations of what a website should be and can do. If I had to choose one design trend or technique to disappear, it would be the notion that web designers don’t need to be skilled in programming and design fundamentals.

Auto-Playing Videos Disrespect User Experience

Auto-playing videos with sound make me want to slam my laptop shut. It’s the digital equivalent of someone shouting in your face the second you walk into a store. Not only does it tank user experience, but it also spikes bounce rates because people bail before they even see your content. If you want to use video, let the user choose to play it—and ideally, make it silent by default with captions. Respect goes a long way online, and forced media is the opposite of that.

Authentic Imagery Outperforms Stock Photos

One trend I wish would disappear is the overuse of cliché healthcare imagery, like the stock photo of a doctor with crossed arms or generic handshakes. With Plasthetix, I’ve seen how patients respond far better to authentic visuals—whether it’s a clinic’s actual staff or snapshots from real patient journeys (with consent, of course). The big takeaway from working with surgeons is that trust and relatability can’t be faked with stock images. From campaign launches to patient-facing websites, original photos consistently outperform generic ones in both click-throughs and inquiries. My tip: invest in real imagery because it pays back in credibility and connection.

Simplify Navigation for Better User Trust

For me, overly complex navigation menus are the biggest offenders in web design. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve opened a SaaS dashboard and had to click five different dropdowns just to find something as basic as billing.

Funny story: when testing an early version of Tevello, I buried course scheduling under three layers, and within minutes, users were messaging me confused screenshots. That experience reminded me that the most-used tasks should always sit front and center. If a platform makes me work hard just to do something simple, I stop trusting it entirely.

Intrusive Pop-Ups Damage User Engagement

Pop-ups that hijack the entire screen before I can even take a breath? Those should vanish immediately. Imagine this scenario: I land on a website to read one quick tip. Suddenly, a full-page pop-up appears, demanding my email address, a survey response, and my firstborn child. I close it, only to have another one pop up as if it didn’t get the message.

I understand the need for lead generation. However, when the design screams ‘me, me, me!’ instead of serving the user, conversions plummet. Visitors feel ambushed. Bounce rates skyrocket. It’s like inviting someone over, then slamming a clipboard in their face before they can even step inside.

Here’s a simple fix: use timing triggers and exit-intent pop-ups sparingly. Let the content shine first. Earn trust. Because if people leave feeling annoyed, all the fancy SEO work in the background becomes pointless.