How to fix bad website design: a 90-day plan

Key takeaways

To fix bad website design without a rebuild, work in order of impact over 90 days. Weeks 1 to 2: measure a baseline and score the site. Weeks 3 to 6: fix readability and the next step. Weeks 7 to 10: fix navigation, trust and access. Weeks 11 to 13: test, measure and decide what is left. Expect to spend about 2 to 4 hours a week of owner time.

• Weeks 1–2: record enquiries and score read, find, trust, act and work.
• Weeks 3–6: fix contrast, type, buttons, contact details and forms.
• Weeks 7–10: fix menus, footer, photos and accessibility.
• Weeks 11–13: compare with the baseline and plan the next step.

Why work in this order?

Readability and the next step affect every visitor on every page, and most fixes are quick. Navigation and trust come next because they matter once people can read and act. Visual polish comes last, because a better-looking page that still cannot be read or used wins nothing.

• The most common business website design mistakes

Weeks 1 to 2: baseline and score

Record current enquiries, calls and form submissions per month, and the enquiry rate if you track it in Google Analytics 4. Then score the site with the GBL Design Mistake Scorecard and watch five customers try one task. List problems by line: read, find, trust, act, work.

• Website design review: score your own site in 30 minutes
• Track every website enquiry to its source

Weeks 3 to 6: readability and the next step

Fix the faults that stop people reading and acting. Most live in global styles and templates, so one change fixes many pages.

• Darken text to pass 4.5:1 contrast; body text at least 16px.
• Make the main button solid, high contrast and clearly labelled.
• Put phone or WhatsApp in the header on every page.
• Add visible labels and clear errors to forms.
• Remove autoplay, sliders and pop-ups on arrival.

• Colour contrast on websites: why grey text loses readers
• Button design: why visitors miss your website buttons
• Where to put contact details on your website

Weeks 7 to 10: navigation, trust and access

With the basics working, help visitors find and trust. Trim and rename the menu, add a useful footer and 404 page, replace stock photos with real ones and fix keyboard access and alt text.

• How many menu items should a website have?
• Team photos on your website: what works and what does not
• Keyboard accessibility: can your site work without a mouse?

Weeks 11 to 13: measure and decide

Compare enquiries and enquiry rate with the baseline, allowing for seasonality, and re-score the site. Watch five more customers try the same task. Then decide: keep improving in place, run a focused test on one page, or plan a redesign for the problems that remain.

• How to measure website redesign success

What can go wrong?

The common failures are changing everything at once so you cannot tell what helped, spending the early weeks on colours, and stopping after the quick wins. Keep a simple log of each change and its date, and resist redesigning pages mid-plan.

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see: an owner planning a rebuild works through the first six weeks and finds the site does most of what they need once text, buttons and forms are fixed. The rebuild becomes a smaller project focused on the few things the platform genuinely cannot do.

Across our client work, websites rebuilt around clarity and an obvious next step have reached a 2.4× enquiry rate; the order of work in this plan follows the same principle.

• See client work
• Website Design & Development for UK businesses
• Website design checklist: 20 checks before you sign off

90-day plan checklist

• Record a baseline of enquiries.
• Score the site and watch five customers.
• Fix readability and the next step first.
• Then fix navigation, trust and access.
• Log every change with its date.
• Compare with the baseline at week 13.

Next step

Write down last month's enquiries today. That number is your baseline.