The best websites for web design inspiration
If you're looking to improve the efficiency of your web design process, a great place to start is with a ready supply of web design inspiration.
Stephanie Corrigan
If you're looking to improve the efficiency of your web design process, a great place to start is with a ready supply of web design inspiration.
Finding the right inspiration for a project is key; and if you don't know where to look, you could waste hours scouring the web only to find subpar examples (speaking from experience). Streamline your process and find better website inspiration faster with a list of go-to sources.
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In this post, I've curated a list of my favorite sources for beautiful and functional website design inspiration. Keep reading to learn more about each source and why they're worth bookmarking for whenever you need a dose of inspiration.
The first place I typically turn to for web design inspiration is siteInspire. With its simple user interface, siteInspire makes the process of browsing and searching for website inspiration easy and intuitive. True to its name, its featured designs never fail to inspire me.
Searchable
At siteInspire, you can filter website designs by Style, Type, Subject, and Platform. In addition, you can type keywords into their search bar to find exactly what you're looking for. This robust search functionality saves you a lot of time if you're looking for something really specific.
Create collections
If you sign up for a free account with siteInspire, you can add your favorite websites to collections for easy reference when needed.
Looking for award-winning website design inspiration? Look no further than Awwwards. Awwwards features the work of the world's top web designers and developers, vetted by a jury of renowned specialists.
Top quality
Only the best of the best websites are featured on Awwwards. It's a great place to find truly unique and innovative web design inspiration. And with new submissions coming in daily, you're guaranteed to find a wide range of website styles, industries, and types to peruse.
Comprehensive rating system
Awwwards scores websites based on five categories: design, usability, creativity, content, and mobile. For each website, you get a breakdown of how it scored in each of these categories, in addition to its overall rating (on a scale of 1-10). This rating system helps you see why a particular website scored well, so you're not just relying on aesthetics.
Lapa.ninja hosts a growing collection of beautiful landing page inspiration from across the web. Their database of web design inspiration is updated daily, and anyone is welcome to submit a landing page for consideration.
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Diverse categories
Landing pages featured on lapa.ninja are divided into a whopping 47 categories. Looking for illustration based designs? Websites using gradients? There's a category for that. There's also the option to filter designs by color, which can come in handy if you're in need of color palette inspiration.
Full-page screenshots
One of the features I love about lapa.ninja is that they display the full landing page design, rather than just the hero section. This saves me time when I don't feel like clicking through to the live website just to see how the rest of the page is laid out.
CSS Nectar is another great source of web design inspiration that is vetted by a team of design experts. Here you can browse websites by category, color, feature, and country.
Vetted designs
With their vetting process, you can rest assured that the websites featured on CSS Nectar are high quality and worthy of your time. Submitting a website costs just $5, and the fee is refunded if the website isn't approved.
Rating system
Similarly to Awwwards, CSS Nectar rates each website categorically. As you're browsing, you can see how each website scores on design, coding, and creativity. The ratings are user-generated, and anyone is welcome to vote.
Best Website Gallery features top-tier website designs, handpicked by designer and developer David Hellman. What started as one man's bookmark collection has evolved over the years into one of the top sites for web design inspiration.
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Multiple page screenshots
A unique and time-saving feature of Best Website Gallery is the display of multiple screenshots from each featured website. Instead of clicking through to a live website and navigating to different pages, you can view a snapshot of many different pages at once, all laid out on a single page. For me, this is a huge plus because sometimes I'm looking for web design inspiration for inner website pages (like About, Shop, or Services). Most of the other websites on this list only showcase the homepage design.
Comprehensive tagging
Best Website Gallery uses a robust tagging system that allows you to filter websites by color, CMS, style, and framework. If you're looking for web design inspiration for your own website, the Designer Portfolio tag is a great place to start with over 50 examples.
Behance is Adobe's platform for showcasing and discovering creative work. It's included with the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, which means anyone with a subscription can publish their work on Behance. To find the best website design inspiration on Behance, visit their web design discover page.
Huge community and selection
Adobe is the gold standard for design software--many of the world's top designers use their products and showcase their work on Behance. And given the large number of users, you can find web design inspiration within any style and industry.
Filter by tool
Behance offers the unique feature of filtering results by tool. Filter your search by design software, CMS, or development framework to see what's possible with the tools at your disposal.
Designspiration offers a Pinterest-esque scrolling feed of design and photography inspiration. Simply search for Web Design to view an endless feed of web design inspiration for your work.
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Scrolling design feed
Designspiration is great if you're not really sure what you're looking for and want to browse through lots of designs until something catches your eye. This format is handy in the early stages of a design project, or if you're simply looking for general inspiration. Create an account to save designs to collections, which are akin to Pinterest's boards. And if you are looking for something specific, you can always use the search bar.
If you're a designer, you're no doubt familiar with Dribbble. If not, Dribbble is an invitation-only platform for showcasing design work and hiring designers. In addition to web design, Dribbble includes categories for animation, branding, illustration, mobile, print, product design, and typography.
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Community-centric
Dribbble's mission is twofold: to share inspiration and to help designers get hired. With its enormous community, there's no shortage of web design inspiration to be found on Dribbble. And because Dribbble is invite-only, the standards are a little higher compared to a platform like Pinterest, where anyone can create an account and publish their work.
If you're a Webflow user, the Webflow Showcase is a great place to find website design inspiration for your work. Sort designs by popularity to see what's currently trending. Plus, you can filter by animation, interaction, template, CMS, e-commerce, and portfolio to find more specific examples.
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Platform-specific
When you're designing for a particular website platform, you may be faced with certain inherent limitations. In that case, it's helpful to browse web design inspiration specific to that platform so that you can see what's possible. The Webflow Showcase offers just that. But unlike other website platforms, the design possibilities with Webflow are virtually limitless--just take a look at their showcase for proof.
P.S. Want to take your Webflow skills to the next level? Our Webflow Masterclass teaches you how to build custom websites quickly and without learning how to code. Our students have been able to charge more for web design projects while working fewer hours. Click here to learn more about the course.
Commerce Cream is another platform-specific source of web design inspiration. As the name suggests, Commerce Cream is focused on e-commerce web design, specifically on Shopify.
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Niche inspiration
If you're specifically looking for e-commerce web design inspiration, Commerce Cream is a great place to start. The featured websites are pre-vetted, so you're only viewing the best of the best.
Trendy design
The websites featured on Commerce Cream are modern and trendy. For instance, many are great examples of minimalism, bold typography, and playful color palettes. Therefore, even if you're not looking for e-commerce inspiration specifically, Commerce Cream is still great source of website design inspiration.
We all know and love Pinterest. It's the go-to platform for finding recipes, outfit inspiration, home decor products, workouts... and web design inspiration? While it probably wasn't intended for web design, or even for graphic design, Pinterest has evolved into a great and reliable source for website design inspiration.
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Multi-purpose
When I'm searching for design inspiration in the initial stages of a project, I'm often looking for a variety of design types, not just web design. For instance, I also look at branding, print design, stationery, typography, color palettes, and even photography. Pinterest offers an all-in-one solution, where I can curate all these different sources of inspiration in one project board. Plus, many of the other websites on this list have an active Pinterest account, so you know you can find quality design inspiration on Pinterest.
Last but not least, there's Instagram. What started as a simple photo sharing app is now the #1 platform to get any kind of visual content in front of one billion active users. With its enormous, active user base, it's no surprise that many designers are using Instagram to showcase their portfolio work.
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Hashtags
Instagram is famous for its hashtags. Anything you're looking for, you can find on Instagram, and that includes web design inspiration. Here are a few hashtags you can start with:
Follow your favorite designers
Instagram is a social network, and one of its best features is the ability to follow other users. Simply follow your favorite designers and design accounts to get daily design inspiration in your feed.
P.S. If you love Instagram, be sure to follow @ransegall for actionable tips and advice on web design and freelancing. And if you're more of a video person and itching for more web design inspiration content, then check out our Youtube video on how and where to find web design inspiration:
Reviewing website inspiration from vetted sources, such as the websites listed above, is a great way to improve your design sensibility. But how do you actually piece together all those different design elements to create a beautiful and functional website for a client? Ran Segall's course, The $10k Website Process, teaches just that via a step-by-step process that incorporates both the strategy and art of web design.
Click here to learn how this course helps web designers across the globe confidently charge $10k and more for their work.
