SEO and Website Design: 10 Trends For 2025

I hear a lot about achieving long-term organic visibility and balancing website design from business owners, web designers, and SEO consultants. In our field, understanding how SEO and Website Design go hand in hand is imperative. On the one hand, you need design to evolve, break boundaries, and stay innovative, but you can’t afford to sacrifice your SEO for design. Also design should at its core value, create utility. In this guide, I will break down 10 SEO and website design trends I see this year, 2025, and how they integrate with SEO. 

If you are interested in discussing your website project, we specialize in high-performing SEO web development and UX design, with ample technical capabilities and SEO adoption, feel free to reach out to us and let’s have a chat. 

Now back to the article!

More Than Just Look and Feel

Modern web design isn't just about aesthetics—it directly influences SEO and long-term organic visibility. Search engines prioritize websites that focus on user experience (UX), time on site, engagement, and accessibility, all of which are shaped by design and user-behavior choices. Below, I will share how each trend affects SEO and your site's ability to rank sustainably.

Let’s jump right in!

10 Website Design Trends That Have an SEO Impact

1. Intentional Imperfection (Messiness)

This means ultimately that websites want to break the standard or the “AI norm” and look intentionally unorganized or “messy”. With AI-driven website builders popping everywhere, many websites feel, look and are structurally the same. Partial responsibility for this is the “off the shelf” AI web design templates. Breaking through this is what we refer to as “intentional imperfection” or “practical messiness”. This can be created with large fonts, non-symmetrical layout and most importantly over-size elements that take up large proportions of the screen. 

Living in the “AI age” means that anything you create that shows it was not just created by a robot but crafted by a human with specific intentions, allows you to engage with the user. 

SEO Impact:

• Authenticity Boost: Unique, hand-crafted elements differentiate your brand, reducing reliance on AI-generated content, which Google might eventually downrank.
• Engagement Signals: Human-centric design can increase dwell time (engagement/time on site of the user) and lower bounce rates—factors or key SEO signs that search engines consider for rankings and determining authority.
• Potential Pitfalls: Messy designs must remain accessible and user-friendly, or they may negatively impact core web vitals (CWV).

✅ SEO Tip: Ensure images, illustrations, icons, animations, and hand-drawn elements are optimized (compressed alt-text included) to prevent slow load times and render well on all devices. Consider designing the site mobile first, then desktop. Take a look at your Analytics and observe where the majority of your traffic comes from; if mobile… you already know. 

2. Micro Interactions or Animations

A couple of years ago full-screen animations were considered the latest thing, this isn’t the case anymore. Parallax animation became too in your face in some cases and even led to “rage clicks” and user frustration. Due to this website design from an SEO standpoint is transitioning towards more subtle interactions and micro animations, vs large full-scale screen animations. 

SEO Impact:

• Improved UX Metrics: Small animations that respond to user actions create a more engaging experience, increasing time-on-page and click-through rates (CTR).
• Accessibility Risks: Poorly executed micro-interactions (e.g., excessive hover effects) may make the site inaccessible to screen readers, hurting SEO.
• Mobile SEO Considerations: As discussed in our previous point, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly designs, so micro interactions must be lightweight and touch-responsive.

✅ SEO Tip: Implement lazy loading and CSS animations instead of JavaScript-heavy effects to keep load times fast. Also, a CDN is critical if the site’s speed for minimal performance benchmarking with optimizations cannot be achieved.

3. Bright and Bold Designs

This isn’t new, but it's just getting bigger and better! Designers and creators are using extremely vivid and clean colors with even more pixels, website design is getting slowly brighter and bolder. 

SEO Impact:

• Stronger Brand Recall: Bold typography and colors can improve brand recognition, leading to higher branded search queries—a ranking factor.
• Readability Issues: Overuse of bright colors and oversized fonts may harm user readability, increasing bounce rates.
• Potential for Increased Backlinks: Unique, bold visuals can attract organic shares and backlinks, improving domain authority.

✅ SEO Tip: Maintain contrast ratios that comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to keep text readable and SEO-friendly.

4. Text-Heavy Websites

Over the past few years, businesses and creators realize the importance of “content”, and the value that text content has in an SEO strategy. Written content drives keyword visibility in the search engine results, and exposes websites to traffic, traffic means attention, and this means opportunity. Back in the day websites could put the keyword in the title, headings, sprinkled throughout the page and magically rank! This has changed. Google and other search engines are looking for content (in this case text) that has utility. 

The issue is that too much text or content can lead to a poor user experience, and also overloading on text doesn’t do any long-term SEO favors, as search engines want value not “volume”. Finding the balance is the key, below I have created a table with some examples of the volume need of text per pages for optimal SEO. 

SEO Impact:

• Higher Keyword Density: Longer-form content helps with semantic SEO and natural keyword integration.
• Pattern Interrupts = Higher Engagement: Unique text layouts force users to slow down and read, increasing time-on-page—a positive ranking signal.
• Risk of Overwhelming Users: If not properly formatted (e.g., no headers, no bullet points), large text blocks may increase bounce rates.

✅ SEO Tip: Use structured data (schema markup) to make text-heavy pages easier for search engines to understand. Consider the table below to know how many words you need for each page from an SEO standpoint.

Shameless promotion >> If you are interested in discussing your website project, we specialize in high-performing SEO web development and UX design, with ample technical capabilities and SEO adoption, feel free to reach out to us and let’s have a chat. 

5. Cursor Alternatives

Curious cursors culture! This is something that I have started seeing more and more. Similar to full parallax animations, these design trends feel like you lose control of the site navigation. I don’t recommend this design trend, and think cursors are a bit like the markings on the motorway, they are white or yellow on black tarmac for a reason. 

SEO Impact:

• Increased Engagement: Unique cursors can encourage user interaction, which may increase CTR on key elements.
• Accessibility & Usability Concerns: If cursor effects are distracting or confusing, they can frustrate users and lead to lower conversions and potentially higher bounce rates.
• No Direct SEO Benefit: Search engines do not directly rank sites based on cursor effects, but poor usability can indirectly hurt rankings.

✅ SEO Tip: If you do plan to use cursor animations and effects (which I wouldn’t recommend). Keep cursor animations optional or minimal to avoid frustrating visitors and negatively affecting engagement. You can also a/b test the user engagement, using heatmaps to look and the users behavior with or without the cursor features. 

6. Sound Integration

Back in the day, in early 2010 this was a thing. It faded out, and now it's back, and with a bang! (no pun intended). Websites are starting to bring in subtle sounds to their content,  creating an additional dimension to the emotional triggers of the user. This is often coupled or matched with some specific effects of content on the site. Whether it's a video that rudely plays automatically with sound, or a faint chirp when you click over something, it's an additional sensation that is focused on improving the users’s experience with this SEO website design feature. (Disclaimer: personally I haven’t seen many positive use cases of this!)

SEO Impact:

• Increased Dwell Time (If Done Right): Well-placed sounds can improve storytelling by adding different dimensions and keeping users on a page longer.
• High Risk of Annoyance: Auto-playing sounds can frustrate users, causing them to bounce quickly, which negatively impacts rankings.
• Not Search-Friendly: Sound elements do not contribute to SEO unless paired with transcribed text.

✅ SEO Tip: Provide clear manual sound controls and always include text-based alternatives (captions, transcripts) for SEO visibility in the case its a video.

7. Scrollytelling (Scroll + Storytelling)

I like this one, but it's never easy to optimize the LCPs or loading times. Scrollytelling is literal visual scrolling accompanied by content storytelling. This often works well if you have an important message to convey on a specific section of the website, you can take the user immediately there or highlight the section as they navigate down or up the page. Sustain the user's attention on a specific area unless the user wants to continue navigating.

SEO Impact:

• Boosts Time-on-Page: Interactive storytelling keeps users engaged, reducing bounce rates.
• Potential for Featured Snippets: Well-structured scrolly-telling articles can be picked up by Google’s Passage Indexing (which ranks specific sections of content).
• Risk of Slow Load Times: Heavy animations can increase Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), a Google Core Web Vital metric.

✅ SEO Tip: Use image lazy loading, powerful CDNs and minified CSS/JS to keep scrolling smoothly and fast.

8. Horizontal Navigation (Beyond Up & Down)

Similar to social media apps such as Instagram, Pinterest, X and others. Scrolling is up and down. Introducing horizontal navigation is an interesting design trend and has an SEO impact, as it could lead to website stickiness (users’ engagement > more time on site) but it could also be frustrating for users if there isn’t a unique design fundamental for this and even could have an impact in search engine visibility of the content.

SEO Impact:

• Breaks Traditional Navigation: This can be engaging, but it risks confusing users accustomed to vertical scrolling.
• Crawling & Indexing Issues: Search engine bots expect standard navigation and unconventional layouts can disrupt proper indexing.
• Conversion Rate Concerns: Users unfamiliar with horizontal scrolling may abandon the site early, affecting rankings.

 ✅ SEO Tip: Ensure clear navigation menus and offer an alternative layout for users who prefer traditional scrolling.

9. Anti-Usability (Challenging UX Norms)

Your website design shouldn’t be a maze, it should be easy for users to navigate and find what they are looking for. That being said for some brands or specific use cases creating and complex anti-usability design is a website design trend that we are definitely seeing more of. Whether it's a high-end exclusive brand that wants to make things a little more unique and “intentionally hard” is a way of creating a sense of curiosity and even potentially higher expectations. Similar to the social and night clubs that are difficult for people to sometimes access, with long lines and a fierce-looking bouncer turning away certain individuals. Sometimes playing hard to get, works. But for website design trends, it's interesting that we are challenging the UX status quo, but how far will it go? 

SEO Impact:

• Can Boost Engagement (if Done Well): Unexpected interactions can increase dwell time and brand curiosity.
• High Risk of Frustration: Complex navigation may increase bounce rates, leading to lower rankings.
• Not Suitable for Most Business Websites: Only works for niche, high-design brands—corporate or eCommerce sites should avoid this.

✅ SEO Tip: Balance creativity with user experience—test usability to ensure engagement without harming conversions, rage clicks, bounce rates and time on site. 

10. Slick Mega Menus

Less is more! As we progress with more pages, more categories, and more content formats, website menus will need to become more slick and organized. With clear hierarchy and categorization, we are seeing more and more websites adopt smaller more organized mega menus. Whether it's combining mega menus with alternative burger menus, website design needs to be focused on showing the user what they are looking for, and quickly. Reverse engineering the user's path to each page (Use Analytics > user paths)  will give you an idea of what categories you should have in the man mega menu, and then what goes underneath and how. 

You can use a free tool like Gloomaps to visualise or re build the layout of your menu.

SEO Impact:

• Unfortunately, users are used to complex mega menus, such as Amazon eBay or even Alibaba: But these complex mega menus are often overwhelming causing users to interact with internal search engines or bounce. Design slimmer simplified mega menus can increase the user's time on site/
• Improved User Journey: Facilitate the user to find what they are looking for by naturally organizing the mega menus with logical organisation. 
• Higher time on site, lower bounce rates: this is due to improved user experience and better engagements. Signalling authority, relevance and trust to the search engines. 

✅ SEO Tip: Organically design your mega menu based on your key areas of focus and what your users would visually categorize the areas of your site. Aim for 4-6 labels at the top, and then expand the categories underneath.

Last time reminding you, If you are interested in discussing your website project, we specialize in high-performing SEO web development and UX design, with ample technical capabilities and SEO adoption, feel free to reach out to us and let’s have a chat. 

Final Takeaways for How Design Impacts SEO & Long-Term Organic Visibility

Website design has a larger impact on SEO and your long-term organic visibility than many people think. 

User time on site is a huge signal to search engines that contributes to SEO, domain authority and long-term organic visibility. 

Focus on choosing the right design trends, and don’t chase all of them! Evaluate which ones will move your website forward as an asset for capturing traffic, attention, opportunity, and revenue! 

Website design > improved user experience > more time on site and engagement > signals sent to search engines >  increased website visibility > more opportunity > revenue!

My SEO Website Design Bucketlst

✅ Winning Strategies:

• Micro-interactions, scrolly-telling, and text-balanced designs enhance engagement metrics, which directly impact SEO.
• Bold branding and unique interactions can increase backlinks and social reach, improving domain authority and overall brand perception.
• Structured navigation and fast load speeds remain critical for search visibility.

❌ Potential SEO Pitfalls:

• Overly experimental trends (cursor effects, sound, anti-usability) may frustrate users, increasing bounce rates.
• Poor mobile performance can lead to ranking penalties in Google’s Mobile-First Index.
• Slow load times from excessive animations can negatively impact Core Web Vitals.

Final Thoughts

My Final SEO Tip: Always balance creativity with usability—a beautifully designed website means nothing if users bounce and search engines can’t index it properly. Send us a message and let’s discuss your website design and how we can optimize the user experience to increase your long-term visibility.