Do Minimalist Website Designs Help or Hurt Your SEO?

As a website owner, do you feel as if the line between a good user experience and optimal search engine optimization (SEO) is a tightrope?

It’s not uncommon to feel like you have to prioritize one over the other. When it comes to minimalist website design, that feeling becomes more pronounced. After all, search engine optimization requires ample content for optimization. Doesn’t it?

This article will explore the relationship between minimalist website design and organic keyword rankings. We’ll look at six websites, including one non-minimalist one, to answer the burning question: Do minimalist website designs help or hurt your SEO?

Why Are Minimalist Website Designs Getting So Popular?

A minimalist website is one that uses content sparingly. This may include words, but it can also include images, graphics, and videos.

So why are minimalist website designs getting so popular?

As more users use smaller screens, the desire for minimalist website designs increases. This is because you want the experience for desktop users and mobile users to be consistent. A minimalist website design means fewer changes for the mobile platform.

A minimalist design is also better for the user experience. With less content cluttering up the viewer’s eyesight, they can more easily journey through the site.

In addition, minimalist websites are prone to faster page loading times, and they are quick to respond to size or orientation changes (such as when viewing on a tablet or smartphone).

How Do Website Design And SEO Interact?

When you’re designing for SEO purposes, you may run into some elements that seem counterintuitive. The good news is that there are ways to ensure SEO doesn’t suffer for the sake of a good user experience and vice versa.

There are some elements of both website design and SEO that are so inextricably linked, it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins. Those are the best places to start if you’re redesigning a website with SEO in mind.

Those website design elements include:

Mobile-friendliness
Website speed
Sitemaps
Readability
Image file names
Alt tags
Website navigation
URL structure
Metadata
Indexable content

With the elements above, the needs of both website users and search engine crawl bots converge. That’s because what’s best for the visitor is what’s best for the crawl bots. That’s always the goal with an SEO-minded website design.

Especially as of late with all the algorithm updates rolling out.

If website design is something that’s seriously on your mind, you’ll be happy to know we have an in-depth guide to follow.

What We Found In Our Data About Minimalist Web Design

Before we dive into the analysis of minimalist websites, let’s define a few things.

First and foremost, our definition of a minimalist website is one with less than 700 words on the homepage. To determine the performance of each site, we analyzed various points, including: