Having a ready supply of web design inspiration is a great place to start if you want to increase the effectiveness of your web design process.
It’s important to find the right ideas to use in a project, but if you don’t know where to look, you might waste a lot of time looking for them online, only to end up with poor examples (speaking from experience). Having a list of trusted resources at your disposal will help you save time, effort, and energy as you search for website inspiration.
Top 12 websites for web design inspiration
With this article, I’d like to share with you some of my go-to places to find ideas for creating aesthetically pleasing and practically useful websites. Read on to find out what makes each of these resources so inspirational, and why you should add them to your bookmarks immediately.
1. siteInspire
When I need a new idea for a website, I go to siteInspire first. siteInspire’s clean interface makes it a breeze to look through examples of great websites for ideas. The featured designs truly do motivate me, as the name implies.
Why visit siteInspire for web design inspiration
Searchable
You can sort website templates on siteInspire by Design, Content, Topic, and Host. In addition, their search bar allows you to enter keywords to locate specific content. If you’re looking for something very specific, the extensive search options here will save you a great deal of time.
Create collections
Create a free account on siteInspire to save your favourite websites in collections for quick access.
2. Awwwards
Are you trying to find examples of websites that have won awards for their design? Try looking at Awwwards instead. The best websites in the industry are showcased on Awwwards after being reviewed by a panel of experts.
Why visit Awwwards for web design inspiration
Top quality
Awwwards only showcases the very best websites in its gallery. It’s a fantastic resource for finding out-of-the-ordinary ideas for your website. There is a wide variety of website designs, industries, and content types to explore because of the constant stream of fresh submissions.
Comprehensive rating system
Each website is given a score in five different categories, including design, usability, creativity, content, and mobile, at the annual Awwwards. Each website’s overall rating is presented alongside its individual category and subcategory scores (on a scale of 1-10). So that you aren’t just going by looks, this rating system explains exactly why a given website received a high score.
3. Lapa.Ninja
An ever-expanding gallery of stunning landing page examples can be found at Lapa.ninja. Any website can be submitted to their database of web design inspiration, which is updated daily.
Why visit lapa.ninja for web design inspiration
Diverse categories
To better organise the landing pages featured on lapa.ninja, we’ve broken them down into a whopping 47 distinct groups. Are you trying to find layouts that make use of illustrations? Gradients on websites? An appropriate subset exists. If you’re looking for a new colour scheme, you can narrow your search by selecting a specific colour.
Full-page screenshots
For example, I appreciate that lapa.ninja shows the entire landing page layout, not just the hero area. When I don’t feel like checking out the actual website to get a feel for the page’s design, this feature is a huge time saver.
4. CSS Nectar
CSS Nectar is another excellent, expert-approved resource for web design ideas. The websites on this page can be viewed in a variety of different ways, depending on the category, colour, feature, and country you select.
Why visit CSS Nectar for web design inspiration
Vetted designs
Because of their rigorous review process, you can trust that the sites highlighted on CSS Nectar are excellent and worth your time. If your website isn’t accepted, the submission fee of $5 will be returned to you.
Rating system
CSS Nectar is a website rating service that, like Awwwards, uses categories to rank sites. You can see how each site rates in terms of design, code, and originality as you navigate. Everyone is free to cast a vote in the ratings that are generated by other users.
5. Best Website Gallery
David Hellman, a designer and developer, curated the best website designs for display in his Best Website Gallery. What was once just one man’s collection of bookmarks has grown into a premier resource for innovative website concepts.
Why visit Best Website Gallery for web design inspiration
Multiple page screenshots
Showing multiple screenshots from each featured website is a time-saving and distinctive feature of Best Website Gallery. View a snapshot of multiple pages at once, all laid out on a single page, as opposed to visiting a live website and navigating to different pages. Because I occasionally need ideas for the layout of internal website pages, this is a huge benefit for me (like About, Shop, or Services). The majority of the other websites on this list only feature the homepage layout.
Comprehensive tagging
When you visit Best Website Gallery, you can search for websites based on colour, content management system (CMS), design, and framework. There are over 50 examples of great web design in the Designer Portfolio tag, which can serve as inspiration for your own site.
6. Behance
Behance is Adobe’s online gallery and portfolio site. Anyone with an active Adobe Creative Cloud membership can use it to share their work on the social media platform Behance. Behance’s web design discover page is where you’ll find the most eye-catching examples of website design.
Why visit Behance for web design inspiration
Huge community and selection
Most of the world’s best designers employ Adobe products and showcase their work on the online portfolio site Behance. With so many people using the internet, ideas for websites can be found in any field or aesthetic.
Filter by tool
In a first for online portfolio sites, Behance allows users to narrow their search based on the software they used. Explore what’s feasible with the resources at your disposal by narrowing your search by design programme, content management system, or development framework.
7. Designspiration
For creative ideas in graphic design and photography, try Designspiration’s Pinterest-like scrolling feed. For an endless stream of web design ideas, just type “Web Design” into a search engine.
Why visit Designspiration for web design inspiration
Scrolling design feed
If you want to look through a wide variety of designs before settling on a final choice, Designspiration is a fantastic resource. This layout is helpful for brainstorming and planning the overall direction of a design project. Sign up to save your favourite designs in collections, which function similarly to boards in Pinterest. You can always use the search box to find what you need.
8. Dribbble
You probably know about Dribbble if you’re a designer. If you haven’t heard of Dribbble before, it’s a platform for showcasing and hiring designers that is accessible only by invitation. Web design is just one of Dribbble’s many specialisations; others include animation, branding, illustration, mobile, print, product design, and typography.
Why visit Dribbble for web design inspiration
Community-centric
Dribbble’s purpose is twofold: to facilitate the spread of creative ideas and to aid in the employment of designers. Dribbble’s massive community means that you’ll never be short on ideas for your next web project. In addition, Dribbble’s invite-only nature means that the quality control is slightly tighter than on a site like Pinterest, where anyone can sign up and start sharing their creations.
9. Webflow Showcase
The Webflow Showcase is an excellent resource for those who use Webflow to get ideas for their own sites. To find out what’s currently fashionable, you can sort designs by their level of popularity. In addition, you can narrow your search for relevant samples by selecting a particular animation type, interaction type, template type, content management system, online store type, or portfolio type.
Why visit Webflow Showcase for web design inspiration
Platform-specific
There may be constraints you must work within when designing for a specific website platform. So that you can get a sense of what is feasible, it is recommended that you look at examples of web design that have been optimised for that platform. You can find it in the Webflow Showcase. However, the design options available in Webflow are practically endless, as evidenced by their showcase.
P.S. Interested in improving your Webflow expertise? Our Webflow Masterclass is designed to help you create unique websites without the need to learn to code. With increased web design project prices comes decreased student labour. To find out more about the training, please visit this link.
10. Commerce Cream
Another platform-specific web design resource is Commerce Cream. Commerce Cream specialises in web design for online stores, and more specifically Shopify stores, as the name would imply.
Why visit Commerce Cream for web design inspiration
Niche inspiration
Commerce Cream is an excellent resource to peruse if you’re in need of some ideas for your online store’s layout. Each featured website has been carefully selected to ensure that only the highest quality are presented to you.
Trendy design
Commerce Cream only showcases cutting-edge, stylish websites. Many, for instance, feature excellent minimalist design, striking typography, and vibrant colour palettes. Therefore, Commerce Cream is a great source of website design inspiration even if e-commerce isn’t your primary focus.
11. Pinterest
Everyone is familiar with and fond of Pinterest. It’s where people turn when they need ideas for what to cook, what to wear, what to put in their homes, how to get in shape, and even how to design websites. Pinterest has become an excellent and dependable source for website design inspiration, despite the fact that it was probably not intended for web design or even graphic design.
Why visit Pinterest for web design inspiration
Multi-purpose
In the planning stages of a project, I often look beyond the realm of web design for inspiration in terms of visual aesthetics. The branding, print design, stationery, typography, colour palettes, and photography are just a few of the other design aspects that I consider. Pinterest is a one-stop-shop because it allows me to compile ideas from a wide variety of sources onto a single board. Plus, many of the other sites here also maintain a Pinterest account, so you can be sure that the design ideas you find there are of high quality.
12. Instagram
Instagram is the final option. What began as a straightforward photo-sharing app has evolved into the preeminent medium for distributing visual content to a global audience of over a billion people. It’s no surprise that many designers are using Instagram to publish their portfolios, given the platform’s huge and engaged user base.
Why visit Instagram for web design inspiration
Hashtags
The use of hashtags on Instagram has attracted a lot of attention. Instagram is a great place to look for web design ideas, or anything else. Some suggested hashtags are as follows:
- #webdesign
- #webdesigntrends
- #webdesigninspiration
- #webdesigner
- #uxdesign
- #uidesign
Follow your favorite designers
One of Instagram’s best features is the option to follow other users. If you want to have daily design inspiration delivered to your feed, all you have to do is follow your favourite designers and design accounts.
In closing, if you’re on Instagram, you should follow @ransegall for practical advice on web design and freelancing. If you prefer visual content and are looking for more ideas for your website, then be sure to watch our video tutorial on finding web design inspiration on YouTube.
