What makes a modern website?

Overview

It is easy to think of a modern website as something you can recognise at a glance. Clean layouts, large images, considered typography, smooth interactions and a few well-placed animations can all make a website feel current, but appearance only tells you so much.

Some of the things that make a website genuinely modern are barely visible to the people using it. They are in how information is organised, how quickly pages respond, how accessible the experience is, how easily content can be managed, and how well the website connects with the other systems an organisation relies on.

A modern website needs to work well today while also being able to change tomorrow, which means thinking beyond how it looks and considering the experience, content, and technology behind it.

A modern website is more than a modern design

Web design changes constantly, with certain layouts, typefaces, interactions and visual styles becoming popular, evolving, and eventually making way for something else. Following those trends can make a website look contemporary, but it does not necessarily make it a good website.

Good design has a job to do. It should establish hierarchy, make information easier to understand, guide attention, and help people know what to do next, while letting an organisation’s visual identity come through without getting in the way of usability.

This is why two modern websites can look completely different. A university, a professional services business, and a health information platform have different audiences, content, and objectives, so no single visual style makes all three modern. The better question is whether the design fits what the website needs to achieve.

Modern websites are built around people

Behind most successful websites is an understanding of who will use them and what those people are trying to accomplish. That sounds obvious, but websites can easily become organised around the structure of the organisation behind them rather than the needs of the people visiting.

Making it easy to find what you need

A website can contain excellent information and still be difficult to use if it’s poorly organised. Information architecture determines how pages, sections and content relate to one another, while navigation gives people a way to move through that structure.

For a small website, that might be relatively straightforward. On a website containing hundreds or thousands of pages, multiple services or several different audiences, it becomes much more important.

Good information architecture should help someone understand where they are, where relevant information is likely to be and how different pieces of content fit together. Search can support this, particularly on larger websites, but it should not have to compensate for an underlying structure that does not make sense.

Making complicated things feel simple

Some websites represent complicated organisations, services or processes, but the website itself does not need to feel complicated as a result. This is one of the most valuable things good user experience design can do.

A complicated process can often be made easier by breaking it into smaller, more manageable steps. Clear content and navigation also matter, helping people understand unfamiliar subjects and find the information that is relevant to them without having to work through everything else first.

Simplicity does not always mean having less. Sometimes it means doing more work behind the scenes so the person using the website has less to think about.

Designing for different people and situations

People will not all experience a website in the same way. They might be using a phone on a slow connection, navigating with a keyboard, increasing the text size, using assistive technology, or simply trying to find something quickly between other tasks.

Responsive design is now a basic expectation, but designing for different people goes far beyond making a layout fit different screen sizes. A modern website should be flexible enough to work across different devices, input methods, and user needs without making one particular way of browsing the default that everyone else has to work around.

Content is part of how a website works

Content and design are sometimes treated as separate stages of a website project: first the website is designed and built, then the content is added. In practice, the two are closely connected because the type, length, and structure of content influence page design, while design influences how easily that content can be read and understood.

A modern website therefore needs to consider information structure as carefully as its presentation. That can mean using consistent heading hierarchies, creating clear relationships between related pages, separating information into reusable fields and deciding when something should be a page, a category, a resource or another type of content altogether.

Structured content becomes particularly valuable as a website grows. Instead of repeatedly creating the same information in slightly different formats, you can manage it more consistently and reuse it where needed. When that information is also presented clearly, it can be easier for search engines, AI systems and other technologies to interpret.

A modern website should be fast

People expect websites to load quickly and respond when they interact with them. Slow-loading content, delayed interactions and layouts that shift as a page loads can all make a website frustrating to use, which is why performance needs to be considered as part of the overall experience.

Performance is more than a PageSpeed score

Tools such as Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights can help identify performance problems and measure aspects of the experience, including Core Web Vitals. However, automated results cannot tell you everything about how a website feels to use.

A website can perform well in an automated test while still containing interactions that feel slow. Equally, chasing a perfect score can lead to a lot of effort being spent on changes that make very little practical difference to visitors.

Performance testing is most useful when measurements are combined with an understanding of the actual website, its users and the reasons behind the results.

Performance starts with how the website is built

Performance needs to be considered while a website is being designed and built, as many of the decisions made along the way will affect it. Images, fonts, scripts and third-party services all add something to a page, so it is worth considering what they contribute and what they cost in terms of performance.

Trade-offs will always exist, so the goal isn’t to remove everything that affects performance, but to make deliberate decisions about what is worth the cost.

Accessibility should be built in from the beginning

Accessibility is another area where it is much easier to make good decisions early than to correct problems later. A modern website should consider semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, focus states, colour contrast, alternative text, form labels, and how content is written and structured.

These decisions can make the website usable for people with a wide range of disabilities, but their benefits often extend further. Clear form labels help everyone understand what information is required, good colour contrast makes content easier to read in different environments, logical headings make long pages easier to scan, and keyboard-friendly interfaces can also help people who simply prefer not to use a mouse.

Accessibility should not be a separate version of the experience. It should be part of how the main experience is designed and built.

The technology behind the website matters

Visitors should not need to know which content management system, programming language or framework sits behind a website. However, those choices still matter because they affect how easily a website can be maintained, how quickly new features can be introduced, how well it performs and how comfortably it can adapt as requirements change.

Choosing technology for the job it needs to do

Using newer technology does not automatically make a website more modern. A well-established technology used appropriately can be a much better choice than a newer alternative selected simply because it is fashionable.

The important questions are practical ones: can the technology support the required functionality, can it be maintained, does it integrate with the systems the organisation uses, and can the people responsible for the website manage it effectively?

Modern web development is not about using everything new. It is about making sensible technical choices that leave room for change.

WordPress can be a modern website platform

WordPress has been around for more than two decades, but the age of a content management system tells us little about the quality of the websites you can build with it.

A WordPress website can range from a simple site assembled from an off-the-shelf theme and plugins to a completely bespoke digital platform with custom content structures, integrations, search functionality and editorial workflows. What matters is how you use WordPress.

For organisations managing substantial amounts of content, a well-designed WordPress platform can give editors control over their website without requiring them to understand the technology underneath it. Developers can build the structure and functionality the website needs while giving content teams practical tools to manage it.

Gutenberg can give editors useful flexibility

The Gutenberg editor has changed what the WordPress editing experience can look like. Used without much thought, it can give editors many options without much guidance on how to use them, but with a more considered approach, it can provide flexibility within a clear design system.

Bespoke blocks can be created for particular types of content, while patterns can provide useful starting points. Controls can be limited to the choices editors actually need, and reusable components can help maintain consistency across the website.

The result does not need to be a completely unrestricted page builder. A good editing experience gives people enough freedom to create useful pages without expecting them to make design decisions every time they add content.

A modern website should not operate in isolation

For many organisations, the website is one part of a much larger digital setup. Information might need to move between the website and a CRM; jobs, events, or products might come from another platform; forms might need to trigger internal processes; users might sign in through an existing account system; or search might bring together information from several different sources.

This means modern website development increasingly involves thinking about how systems work together. A website might connect with:

• CRM and marketing platforms
• internal databases
• search services
• payment providers
• recruitment or booking systems
• authentication services
• external APIs and data sources

The technology used to make those connections is important, but the integration itself is not the goal.

Integrations should make something easier

A useful integration should solve a real problem. If a team currently enters the same information into two systems, connecting them might remove that duplication. If important information changes frequently, pulling it from its source can reduce the risk of outdated copies appearing elsewhere. If users already have an account with an organisation, connecting authentication systems might save them from creating another one.

The value isn’t simply in connecting two systems; it’s in what becomes easier, faster, or more reliable once those systems can work together.

Search and AI are changing how websites are discovered

For a long time, search engines have influenced how websites organise and describe their information, and AI is adding another layer to that relationship. People can increasingly ask questions through AI assistants or AI-powered search experiences and receive an answer assembled from multiple sources before they visit a website.

That does not remove the need for websites, but it does make the quality and structure of their information increasingly important. Clear page structures, descriptive headings, meaningful relationships between content, structured data, and consistent information about organisations and services can all help machines interpret what a website is saying.

This is not just about making content for AI. Much of what makes information easier for machines to understand also makes a website more coherent for people, so clearer structure and better-organised content have value regardless of how someone discovers it.

Security and privacy have to be part of the foundations

Security is another part of a website that is often most successful when visitors barely notice it. HTTPS, software updates, sensible permissions, secure hosting, protected forms and careful handling of user data should form part of the basic foundations of a professionally managed website.

The same applies to privacy. Websites often rely on analytics, embedded services and third-party platforms, all of which can affect how visitor information is processed. So those technologies need to be understood and implemented appropriately, not added without considering what happens to the data involved.

Security and privacy requirements will differ between websites, but neither should be treated as an optional add-on once everything else is built.

A modern website should be easy to manage

There are two experiences to consider when designing a website: the visitor experience and the experience of the people who have to run it.

A website can look excellent from the outside while being frustrating to manage behind the scenes. Editors might have to copy the same information into several places, work around rigid templates, or rely on developers for relatively simple changes, so a modern CMS should reduce those problems rather than create more.

The day-to-day experience matters. Content teams should be able to understand how information is organised, make routine updates confidently and see how their changes will appear. A website that requires unnecessary work to keep content accurate and up to date can become difficult to maintain, regardless of how good it looks to visitors.

Reusable components make websites easier to maintain

Reusable components are valuable to visitors, editors and developers. For visitors, they create consistency because a particular type of information behaves familiarly wherever it appears. For editors, they provide a reliable way to add established content types without rebuilding them every time. At the same time, developers can update the component itself rather than finding and updating many separate versions across the website.

Those benefits become increasingly important as a website grows and more people become involved in maintaining it.

A modern website is never really finished

Launching a website is an important milestone, but it should not be the point at which improvement stops. Once people begin using a website, more information becomes available about what works and what does not.

Analytics might show that an important journey is being abandoned, while search data might reveal that people use different terminology than the organisation. Performance monitoring could identify a problem introduced by a new third-party service, and user research might uncover a need that was not obvious during the original project.

The organisation itself will change too as services develop, teams change, new content is created, and new technology becomes useful. A healthier way to think about a website is therefore:

This approach works best when the website has been built to accommodate change. Improvements should be a normal part of managing the website rather than something that requires a major development project every time requirements evolve.

How can you tell if your website is keeping up?

Many of the characteristics of a modern website are easier to recognise when you think about how the website is actually being used. A website might still look contemporary while becoming increasingly difficult for visitors to navigate or for the organisation to maintain.

A useful starting point is to ask a few practical questions:

• Can visitors find important information without needing to understand how your organisation is structured?
• Does the website work comfortably across different devices, input methods and accessibility needs?
• Can your content team make routine updates without repeatedly needing help from a developer?
• Do pages load and respond quickly during normal use, rather than just performing well in an automated test?
• Can new content, services or functionality be introduced without rebuilding large parts of the website?
• Do you have reliable ways to identify problems, understand how people use the website and make improvements?

A website does not need to be perfect in every area to be considered modern, and the priorities will vary depending on its purpose. However, if several of these questions are difficult to answer positively, it may be worth looking beyond the visual design to understand what is holding the website back.

What does a modern website look like in practice?

There is no single answer because each organisation’s requirements are different. For one organisation, the challenge might be presenting thousands of pages of information in a way that makes sense to several distinct audiences, while for another it might be bringing together information from different systems. Elsewhere, the priority might be giving a small content team an easier way to manage a large, frequently changing website.

This is why looking at real projects can be more useful than looking for a checklist of modern website features.

Our own work includes WordPress websites and digital platforms for organisations with very different audiences and requirements. These three projects help demonstrate how those requirements can influence the way a website is designed and developed.

Rather than showing what a modern website should look like, these examples show how the same principles can produce very different results when they are applied to different problems.

Modern does not mean using everything new

The web will keep changing as new design trends appear, browsers gain new capabilities, AI changes how people find and interact with information, and new frameworks, platforms and tools promise better ways to build things. A modern website does not need to adopt all of them.

What matters is whether the website works well for the people using it, works well for the organisation managing it and has the foundations to change when there is a good reason to. That is a more useful definition of modern than any particular design trend or piece of technology because it gives the website a much better chance of still doing its job when today’s idea of modern has moved on.

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