Poorly Designed Websites Impact Rankings: Here's Why

There are numerous things that can work against you in your Google search rankings. You might encounter content scrapers, bad incoming links, negative SEO or social media backlash. Visual design alone is not a direct ranking factor. However, design decisions that create crawling, indexing, mobile usability or performance problems can harm search visibility.

A bad website can make it harder for users to access, understand or trust what you offer. For search engines, the concern is not whether a site looks attractive, but whether its content is accessible, crawlable, understandable and useful.

How, specifically, can you go wrong creating a bad website?

No Attention to On-Site SEO

What we call search engine optimisation actually means making sure your website serves end users well. Google’s engineers don’t just randomly decide what matters for your website. It’s the result of years of studying what people expect from a good website – and a few steps forward too, thinking ahead about what they’d want even before they know they want it.

My great-grandmother didn’t know she needed a dishwasher. It didn’t exist yet. But the need was always there.

What Google does with all that data is pass it to their engineers, who convert it into algorithms. And those algorithms are designed to reward websites that serve end users best. So what does ignoring SEO during the design process actually look like in practice? Here are just some examples:

Heading tag hierarchy and visual rhythm. It’s not just about avoiding starting with an H2; you also need to consider how the heading hierarchy is reflected visually in the design. Your H1 is the biggest title, your H2 slightly smaller, your H3 smaller again – each stepping down in a consistent, deliberate scale. This makes content easier to scan and signals to both users and search engines that your page has clear heading structure.
Missing favicon. That small site symbol sitting next to your URL in search results and browser tabs. Easy to overlook, but it reinforces brand recognition and professionalism.
Missing or auto-generated meta tags. When meta tags are pulled from a template rather than written with intent, you end up with duplicate or meaningless descriptions that do nothing for your visibility.
No internal linking. It’s one of SEO’s most underrated assets. Always aim to offer more context – just without being pushy about it.
Missing key pages. An About Us page and GDPR-related pages (Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy) should be easy to find. Google rewards transparency and trust, and so do users.
Unoptimised images. A 10MB file named shutterstock_89729871.jpg with no alt text is not something you want on your website. Compress and optimise images before uploading, rename them descriptively, and always add alt text.
No links to social media profiles. These don’t need to be prominent, but they help search engines (and visitors) confirm which other online profiles belong to you beyond the website itself.
No space for reviews. You’ve told people what you do (services pages), who you are (About Us), and covered your obligations (GDPR pages). Now show them what others say about how you do it. Don’t make visitors leave your site to hunt for reviews. A good designer will display them prominently, so that from the moment someone lands, there’s as little friction as possible between that first click and the final one – whether it’s “Place an order”, “Give us a call”, or “Send an email”.

Poor Configuration Creates Duplicate Titles and Content

Poor configuration can create several different SEO problems. Using only your brand name as the title tag on every page creates duplicate, unhelpful titles that make individual pages harder for users and search engines to distinguish.

Separately, some eCommerce platforms generate multiple URLs containing identical or near-identical product content. Clear URL handling, redirects where appropriate and canonical tags can help search engines identify the preferred version and consolidate ranking signals.

Splitting Articles Into Low-Value Pages

One common strategy in the past, which has persisted on some large networked websites in recent years, is the idea of dividing up pages into a lot of smaller pages. Write a top 10 list with 35-word entries for each? Split it into 10 pages, an intro, one page for each item, and a conclusion with links to other articles! It maximized pageviews, but it makes your site suffer in load times, usability and thin content. Google dislikes these sorts of thin schemes to inflate pageviews, the pages-per-visit metric and affiliate impressions.

Poor Scripting and Coding Slowing Load Times

Scripts and plugins are great to expand the features and shape the user experience of a website. On the other hand, poorly executed scripts cause a lot of problems. For one thing, old, broken scripts can be an easy entry point for cybercriminals. For another thing, a broken script can have many negative effects. It can slow down page loads. It can disrupt site rendering to make a page not load properly. It can throw errors in browsers that make users bounce.

In general, scripts – particularly broken scripts – increase load times, affect Core Web Vitals, damage the UX, and can disrupt Google’s web crawlers.

Again, we are designing websites for humans. A website should not feel like the Mona Lisa in Paris, where access depends on having the time, money, and patience to get there. It should be available to everyone, as easily and reliably as possible.

Google’s expectation is simple: users and crawlers should be able to reach and understand your website without unnecessary barriers. And these days, “but my website is really fast” is a phrase that needs a bit of unpacking. Fast for whom? Fast on which device? Fast on which connection?

Google doesn’t just want your site to be fast when you’re sitting next to your home broadband. They want it to be fast for everyone – including someone relaxing on a beach on a sunny afternoon with a 4G connection. That person should still have a smooth, enjoyable experience browsing your site.

A good redesign should always include some form of performance optimisation (whether that’s image compression, minimising render-blocking scripts, or more advanced techniques) followed by a proper test in Google’s PageSpeed Insights or a similar dev tool.

It’s not optional; it’s the baseline.

Intrusive Pop-ups Obscure Content and Hurt UX

While we’re on the subject of page speed, there’s one element that deserves its own mention – and you probably saw it coming.

Popups.

Businesses work hard to earn trust and drive action. Free audits, 10% off a first purchase, complimentary samples – these are genuine incentives that can make the difference between a visitor and a customer. They matter.

But there’s a balance to strike. Hide them poorly and you lose the conversion. Overdo them (stacking multiple popups, loading them with heavy animations or bloated scripts) and you’re back to the page speed problem we just covered. The very tool meant to win a customer ends up driving them away before they’ve read a single line.

Good design finds the middle ground: visible enough to be noticed, light enough not to punish the page, and timed well enough not to ambush someone who just arrived.

Poor Planning Blocks the Googlebot

Often, when you are developing a site, you want to host it online but prevent it from being indexed until it is ready. Use a noindex robots meta tag on HTML pages or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header while allowing the URLs to be crawled. Do not put noindex in robots.txt: Google does not support it there. If robots.txt blocks a URL, Google cannot crawl the page to see its noindex directive, and the URL may still appear in search results without a snippet. Before launch, remove the noindex directive and confirm that important pages and resources are not blocked by robots.txt.

Inconsistent User Experience Hides Value

Probably you’ve found yourself in a situation lately where you’re no longer searching for recipes on recipe websites. Neither am I.

You use AI.

It’s not our intention here to call out recipe website creators – but to point out something bigger. Perhaps something that will shape the future of web design entirely.

You need to prove the claim that gets repeated everywhere these days – that you’re better than AI. And one of the most powerful ways to do that is through impeccable UX.

From point A, where someone lands on your website, to point B, where they bookmark it and share it with a friend. That’s what great UX does for you. That’s the journey worth designing.

A user visits your homepage.

How many clicks do they need to make to find something they want to see?
Do each of your navigation buttons require a click to open a drop-down just to see if what they want might be inside?
Do they need to click to a category and browse through pages of unsorted content to find something of interest?
To search your site, would they need to back out and visit Google?

Colour Choices Hide Text and Drive Users Away

One interesting trend worth noting – bright colours are making a comeback. Partly driven by higher screen resolutions, which make bold palettes look far more refined than they did in the early days of the internet.

If you want a live example, take a look at the backend of the new WordPress 7. It’s a masterclass in using colour with intention.

So what does any of this have to do with SEO?

Colour choices can affect readability, accessibility and whether people stay on your website. When visitors struggle to read your content, they may leave. That is a serious user-experience and conversion rate problem, but it should not be described as a standalone Google ranking signal.

So should every website now be bold and bright? Not at all. But when designing, keep in mind that colour isn’t there to impress or overwhelm. It’s there to help:

Draw attention to elements that would otherwise be missed on a first glance.
Guide the user toward where they naturally want to go- not trick them into going somewhere they don’t. Colour should confirm the journey, not hijack it.

Poor Coding and Old Technology Open Security Holes

Bad code, no matter where it is or who does it, is a massive vulnerability.

On your end, you have the potential for hackers to compromise your site. They might completely replace your page with a propaganda page of their own. They might insert a few subtle links and a backdoor admin account. They might just copy your sensitive data and leave, with you none the wiser. Your customers may find their personal information stolen, their account information phished or their traffic redirected to a third party site full of viruses.

Out of date plugins, poorly implemented scripts, even a stock website platform all can contribute to a risk of hacking.

So that’s a designer’s job these days?

I certainly hope this isn’t being read by a beginner web designer – it might seem overwhelming, and they might start seeing design as a path not chosen by the faint-hearted.

But then again, let’s do justice to the Mona Lisa mentioned earlier, and to her creator. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t paint her to hang above his fireplace. He painted her for the world to see – to share his inner world, his genius, with anyone who cared to look.

hat’s exactly the mindset a web designer should carry into every project. Effective web design and development isn’t just about creating an attractive set of pages. A website should solve a real problem – whether that’s entertaining someone, helping them find the right product or connecting them with an emergency electrician at midnight.

That’s the bigger purpose worth keeping in mind.

Some call it search engine optimisation. Some call it common sense. Honestly? It’s both.

Poorly Designed Websites Impact Rankings: Here’s Why