Websites · Guide
12 web design inspiration websites for your next project
Planning a new website? These are the galleries designers use to find layouts, colour, typography and fresh ways to present a business. Here’s what each one is best for, and how to turn inspiration into a website that works for your customers.
3 min read · SiteBuddy guide
Why web design inspiration helps
Good design changes how quickly visitors understand what you do, whether they trust you, and whether they get in touch. Browsing well-made websites trains your eye: you start to notice how a strong page leads with a clear promise, how much space sits around the text, and where the main button lives.
It also makes briefing a designer much easier. Showing three websites you like, and saying why, is worth more than a page of adjectives.
How we chose these sites
- Carefully curated, high-quality designs
- A good spread of industries and styles
- Updated regularly
- Free to browse
The 12 websites
1. Awwwards
One of the best-known web design award galleries. Sites are judged on design, usability, creativity and content, so the standard is very high.
Best for: ambitious, highly polished designs. Treat them as a source of ideas rather than a template: many are deliberately experimental.
2. Behance
Adobe’s showcase where designers publish complete projects, often with the thinking behind them.
Best for: seeing how a logo, brand and website come together as one project.
3. Dribbble
A design community built around short previews, or “shots”, of interface ideas.
Best for: individual sections, buttons, icons and colour combinations.
4. SiteInspire
A curated gallery you can filter by style, type and subject.
Best for: clean, well-structured layouts for real businesses.
5. CSS Design Awards
Awards with a focus on front-end craft: layout, animation and technical polish.
Best for: interaction and animation ideas, used sparingly.
6. The FWA
Long-running awards for experimental, highly interactive websites.
Best for: immersive storytelling. Inspiring, but rarely the right fit for a small business site.
7. Designspiration
A visual search engine for design, including the option to search by colour.
Best for: mood boards and colour palettes.
8. Muzli
A daily, curated feed of design inspiration and news, available on the web and as a browser extension.
Best for: keeping up with what’s new without hunting for it.
9. One Page Love
A gallery dedicated to single-page websites.
Best for: landing pages and simple small business sites where everything sits on one page.
10. Hoverstat.es
A gallery of alternative, unconventional web design.
Best for: fresh ideas when everything else starts to look the same.
11. Land-book
A large gallery of websites and landing pages, organised by category.
Best for: practical small business and startup layouts you can learn from quickly.
12. Lapa Ninja
Thousands of landing page examples, sorted by industry and style.
Best for: section-by-section ideas: hero areas, pricing tables, testimonials and footers.
Design trends worth knowing in 2026
- Large, plain-English headlines that say exactly what a business does
- Generous white space and fewer, calmer sections
- Real photography of real work instead of generic stock images
- Accessible colour contrast and readable text sizes
- Fast, lightweight pages that load well on phones
- Subtle motion rather than heavy animation
How to use inspiration without copying
- Collect three to five sites you like, and write down why you like each one
- Look at the structure (what comes first, second and third), not just the colours
- Check every site on your phone; most of your visitors will see yours that way
- Adapt ideas to your own brand, customers and content
- Keep speed and accessibility in mind; a beautiful page that loads slowly loses people
Inspiration isn’t copying. Lifting someone’s layout, words or images can infringe copyright, and it rarely fits your business anyway. Use what you find to understand what works, then make it your own.
Common mistakes
- Copying a layout exactly
- Choosing looks over clarity
- Adding animation because it is available, not because it helps
- Forgetting how the design behaves on mobile
- Designing for your own taste rather than your customers
From inspiration to your own website
If you’d rather start from layouts that are already proven for small businesses, have a look at our example website concepts for trades, cafés, beauty, professional services, local services and retail. For what makes a homepage turn visitors into enquiries, read how to create a homepage that converts.
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