When your website works, products take center stage and customers can easily find what they need. But standing out matters too.
In chasing differentiation, many brands fall into the trap of digital maximalism—cluttering their sites with animated pop-ups, parallax scrolling, and labyrinthine menu structures. This can quickly become overwhelming, burying key messages under layers of distraction, sending visitors clicking in frustrated circles, and transforming mobile browsing into an obstacle course. Not ideal.
On the flipside, a clean, minimalist web design gives visitors breathing room. Here’s practical advice for implementing simple website design, with design inspiration from ecommerce companies that balance clarity with impact.
Principles of simple website design
- Effortless user interface
- Intuitive navigation systems
- Legible, hierarchical typography
- Fast load times
- Responsive web design
Simple design isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about results. Sara Mote, creative director and founder of Mote Agency, a Shopify Partner specializing in ecommerce web design, understands this delicate balance.
“It’s important to think of design as communication. Like a conversation, design has the power to captivate the audience, convey information, and evoke emotions, which will directly impact consumer decision making,” Sara says. “Good design increases the quality of those conversations. It helps create a seamless and engaging experience, which in turn reinforces brand identity and drives performance metrics like sales and customer retention.”
Here are some key principles of simple design with insights from Sara and her cofounder, Rembrant Van der Mijnsbrugge:
Effortless user interface
User interface (UI) is how visitors interact with your website—the buttons, menus, and visual elements that enable them to find what they need. A good UI feels invisible, guiding visitors intuitively—like putting the shopping cart where people expect to find it and making sure buttons look clickable. Bad UI, on the other hand, frustrates users with confusing navigation, inconsistent patterns, or elements that don’t behave as expected—like dropdown menus that vanish before you can click on them or text that’s hard to read.
“Design elements such as imagery and typography that establish a brand’s unique narrative shouldn’t overshadow or impede the basic functionality on the website,” Sara says.
Use online accessibility contrast checkers to ensure the text overlaid on images maintains at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio between the text color and background. You can also add semi-transparent overlays behind white text on busy product photos or darken the edges of images to improve readability.
When incorporating movement into your interface, keep automatic hero image transitions at a comfortable viewing pace and limit header message rotations between promotional offers to a gentle rhythm. This gives your website visitors enough time to actually read each message before it changes.
Intuitive navigation systems
Intuitive ecommerce site navigation starts with understanding the customer’s journey—from landing to purchase. When shoppers arrive, they need immediate visual cues that guide them toward your product categories, shopping cart, or account login through an organized header menu. This should reflect how customers actually think about products—not how your business categorizes them internally.
For example, a cookware brand might organize items by cooking purpose (“baking” or “grilling”) rather than pan size. A clothing retailer could have featured pages for “outfit staples” or “tees and tanks under $30” instead of only dividing their offerings into shirts, pants, and accessories.
“The biggest tip for improving navigation design is just to prioritize your product discovery through all navigation elements. That means menus, collection page filters, as well as search,” Sara says.
For better navigation that helps customers find what they’re looking for:
- Position bestsellers first. Bring attention to your most popular categories in the top nav by putting them first and using subtle visual emphasis like a pop of color or a heavier font weight.
- Organize filters by use. Create filters that match shopping habits, like sorting dresses by occasion or length, rather than just by size or color.
- Implement predictive search. Add thumbnail previews that appear as customers type, showing related categories beneath results to help them discover items they might have missed through traditional browsing.
Legible, hierarchical typography
Typography and font choices play a critical role in how quickly visitors process information on your website. Effective typography creates visual hierarchy—organizing elements by importance—through proportional contrasts between headings and body text, guiding readers naturally. In other words, create a noticeable difference between the size of headings, subheadings, and body text so visitors know what to focus on first and what to explore next for more details. Creating this kind of intuitive reading path promotes cognitive ease.
“Good typography guides the reader’s eyes through the text, emphasizing important information, enhancing comprehension,” Sara says. “The most common pitfall that I see when choosing typography is selecting a font that isn’t ideal for the exact type of text being presented to a user.” Display fonts—decorative, high-impact typefaces designed for headlines and titles—might work great for short headlines but become frustrating when used for lengthy product descriptions. Meanwhile, fonts with poor letter spacing can make critical information like pricing or shipping details harder to scan.
Limit yourself to two to three complementary fonts, such as pairing a clean sans-serif (fonts without decorative strokes at the end of letters) with a more distinctive serif (fonts with small lines at the end of characters) for headlines. Look for fonts that offer multiple weight variations—varying from thinner light versions to thicker bold options—giving you (or your web designer) options to create visual hierarchy without needing to introduce additional typefaces that create clutter and visual chaos.
Fast load times
Performance is an often overlooked aspect of great web design. When pages, images, and videos take too long to appear, the entire user experience suffers. Empty spaces, missing content, and jerky loading undermines your careful design work, regardless of your visual choices.
Sara suggests a simple exercise when designing your business website: “Imagine your users are shopping from their phones on a flight with spotty in-air Wi-Fi—because most of us have been there,” she says, adding that websites are often designed and tested in a controlled environment with perfect Wi-Fi.
Website builders handle many optimization tasks automatically. Nonetheless, it's best to compress images before uploading them and use shorter video clips. File formats matter, too. JPEG works well for photos, while PNG is ideal for graphics with transparent backgrounds. Newer formats like WebP can provide even better compression.
Responsive web design
Responsive design ensures your website looks and works well on all screen sizes by automatically adjusting layouts, images, animated images, and text to fit different devices. Rather than creating separate sites for desktop and mobile, responsive sites use flexible grids and media queries to deliver an optimized experience whether someone visits from a phone, tablet, or computer.
“The reason responsive design is important is because yes, now we’re looking at 60% [traffic from] mobile devices. But for some of our clients, we’re even looking at 80%, and it often depends on where the traffic is coming from,” Rembrant says.
Mobile screens require strict content prioritization—your most compelling image and key selling points should be above the fold, with prominent call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Make your touch targets (the clickable areas of buttons, links, and menu items) large enough and well-spaced to avoid accidental taps. Mobile layouts that stack content in a single column, with clear divisions between sections, typically work better than forcing desktop layouts into small viewports that require pinching and zooming to read.
Shopify’s themes are built to be responsive, with device preview tools that let you check how your site appears across different screen sizes before publishing changes.
5 best simple website design examples
These five business sites show how clean, focused web design keeps customers engaged. Here are simple website examples for design inspiration; pay attention to how each store creates a distinct brand personality while maintaining an intuitive shopping experience:
1. Justin Reed
Justin Reed is a luxury consignment shop that buys and sells rare designer pieces, limited-edition collaborations, and high-end vintage clothing and collectibles. Its website—designed by Mote Agency—is a digital extension of its brick-and-mortar store, creating a sense of stark simplicity. Each page has a clean black-and-white color scheme and bold uppercase logo contrasted with lowercase and lightweight menu text.
Justin Reed’s intuitive navigation menu organizes products into clear categories (like “New Arrivals” and “Designers”) while maintaining plenty of white space, creating a shopping experience that feels exclusive yet straightforward—whether you’re on desktop or mobile.
“With Justin Reed, the majority of their user base is mobile and even coming from social media such as in-app on Instagram,” says Sara. “They’re opening the website from the Instagram app. Because of that, we prioritize the mobile navigation experience.”
The mobile website offers intuitive browsing with a collapsible vertical menu that slides in from the left, clean stacked content blocks on landing pages, and product galleries that let shoppers swipe horizontally through detailed images of Justin Reed’s inventory.
2. Camillette
Camillette is a Montreal-based jewelry brand specializing in handcrafted, delicate designs. Its site employs a warm, feminine color palette of soft pinks and neutrals with typography that pairs a thin, spaced-out uppercase font for navigation items and a lighter-weight font for headings and section titles. This creates a refined balance that mirrors the delicate craftsmanship of its jewelry pieces.
Rather than forcing visitors to hunt through menus, Camillette’s homepage flows naturally from one section to the next as you scroll down—showing off latest collections, upcoming workshop dates, core values, and the founder’s story all in one scrollable experience. The product shots draw attention to the details in each piece, giving customers a clear view of what awaits them when their order arrives or when visiting Camillette’s Saint-Hubert Street studio.
PODCAST: How This Jeweler Grew Her Side Gig Into a Viable Business
3. Maguire
Sisters Myriam and Romy launched Maguire in 2017 to sell high-quality footwear at fair prices by cutting out industry middlemen. The brand’s website balances style and function with intuitive menus that organize products by both traditional categories (boots, flats, sandals) and practical fit solutions (narrow feet, wide feet, high arches) for a customer-first approach.
The clean, warm-toned web design with ample white space creates a shopping environment that feels both modern and accessible. Maguire’s homepage follows a journey from seasonal collections to staff picks, with clear sections that communicate its core values of design-first thinking, transparent pricing, and ethical production, reinforcing its brand story at every scroll point.
PODCAST: This Footwear Founder Shares Her Secret to Working With Factories
4. Waterboy
Waterboy is a hydration company created by founders Mike and Connor to help people recover faster after workouts and nights out. Its ecommerce store shows that a brand website can be clean and simple without defaulting to the standard beige-and-white aesthetic. Waterboy’s website embraces a playful aesthetic with a light blue background and navy blue and pink accent colors that create a water-inspired look.
The straightforward top navigation menu is cleverly organized by occasions rather than product categories—daily, weekend, workout—instantly communicating when you’d need each formula. The homepage features a detailed comparison table that illustrates the differences between its various hydration options and competitor products, with graphics that communicate information with few words.
Conversational copywriting throughout the site matches Waterboy’s laid-back brand voice without sacrificing important product information.
PODCAST: This Footwear Founder Shares Her Secret to Working With Factories
5. Klur
Klur is a woman-owned skin care brand focused on clean, ethical, and inclusive beauty formulations developed through years of hands-on esthetician experience. With a website designed by Mote Agency, its homepage features a striking black-and-white photograph of a woman applying product to her skin, with a neutral palette of black, white, and beige. The photo dominates the entire viewport, making a bold artistic statement rather than immediately showing products.
Klur’s website also rejects complex navigation. There are no expanding product menus because its entire collection comprises just 12 items, all displayed on a single product page. This simplicity is carried throughout the entire site. Klur’s About section is a short letter with no graphics, while the search feature expands across the full width of the page when clicked, pushing everything else into the background to create a focused discovery experience. Plus, the layout uses generous margins on all sides, creating an abundance of negative space that frames the content.
“The Klur site is a really strong sample because it is very tightly coordinated to the branding and packaging,” Sara says. “It feels like a harmonized experience from the moment you land on the website to the moment you receive and unpackage her products.”
Simple website design FAQ
How can I design a simple website?
Focus on clean user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) with legible typography, intuitive navigation, strategic colors, optimized load times, and a mobile-first responsive design. Good site builders let you pick themes that match your brand story, no design expertise needed.
Can a beginner build a website?
Yes. Website builders like Shopify, Squarespace, WordPress, and Wix have made creation accessible to everyone—no coding skills required. Just pick a template, customize with your content, and launch.
What are good tools to build a website?
Site builders like Shopify, Squarespace, WordPress, and Wix make creating websites easy with drag-and-drop features and pre-designed templates. Shopify is perfect for online stores, offering built-in payment processing, inventory management tools, and much more.
