We may not judge a book by its cover, but we always judge a business by its website. Over the years, we have come across such worst website designs that have made us question our own aesthetic sense. While some of them have left us in splits, others have made us cry out loud in frustration!

A bad website design may not always involve gaudy elements and horrible images. Sometimes the lack of user-friendly navigation is more than enough to make us leave the site.

Here’s a list of such 50 bad websites in year 2020 that will leave you shocked with surprise! This list of worst websites can tell us what design mistakes we must avoid at all cost!

1. Yale University School of Art

When the website belongs to Yale, we expect something extraordinary. But this particular website leaves your senses assaulted especially because you expect an art school to have a website that’s more appealing to your visual senses. For a moment, it leaves you wondering if you are in the right place since, come on, it’s Yale we are talking about!

This website uses Ruby on Rails and is programmed by the faculty and students quite often. But the tiled images in the background and the horrible font choices are simply inexcusable. The navigation is pretty user friendly but the ghastly use of manga and pop animated backgrounds are enough to put you off.

2. Suzanne Collins Books

We love Suzanne Collins aka the author of the Hunger Games trilogy. With the amazing description of the citadel folks in the book and the detailed portrayal of futuristic fashion, you would expect the Suzanne Collins Books website to look suave and trendy. But it’s far from that. Say hi to dead links, white spaces and navigation difficulties. Don’t believe us? Try it yourself.

The website is designed for 200 percent zoom, and clicking on the book covers on the homepage does nothing. As a matter of fact, there’s a surprise word doc that readers can download containing a list of Children’s Choice Award Nominations. We simply do not understand the point of keeping a downloadable word document when it could easily have been just another page!

3. High School Sports in Mississippi

The website is archaic in terms of technology as it’s just safe to say that the designers have not heard of responsive templates. The color combination may be a secret homage to the Confederates, but sure as daylight, it makes you want to put those shades back on. The entire page is overcrowded, and the content is not arranged in different pages. In fact, you need to download PDF files to be able to read the content of each page. As far as we can tell, the website is using a wrong layout. They can go with a WordPress magazine theme/template for better results.

4. Tag Team Signs

If you are bored of your hunky-dory life, please visit the Tag Team Signs website. From navigation to responsive design, everything is just wrong with this one! This is a Flash website with a will of its own. Music starts playing without asking for permission and the animation that gets stuck every second. This website simply does not work on mobile. Statutory warning – do not go in there if you are having a bad day.

5. Gulla’s Arrestling

With the world going crazy over police brutality in certain countries, this website ushers in brutality in website design. It looks and feels far from professional, and the content is simply below par. It is evident that except the website designer, everyone knows the importance of a “Title” tag in SEO. The worst issue is that the registration form for the upcoming conference is a PDF. So you cannot edit it online. You need to download it and mail it. And the website does not have an integrated payment pathway, which means you need to make the credit card payments over phone.

6. Illuminati Exposers

The name surely does grab a lot of eyeballs, but the website will make your senses scream in physical pain. They may be thinking about waking people up from the slurry of conspiracies, but honestly, the designers should have woken themselves up completely before publishing such a worst website. This makes you ask the question, “have they ever seen another website?” Even if you leave out the garish fonts and horrible images, the navigation will not be your friend.

7. Exmouth View Hotel

We are sure this hotel has lost quite a few guests after they checked into their website. If you want to get a crash course on “cheesy website design”, please check out the Exmouth View Hotel website. This may just be the worst hospitality website on the internet. If you want to scare off your guests in the recreation attempt of Bates Motel, definitely derive inspiration from this one.

8. MGBD Parts & Services

The color combination makes you wish that you had your RayBans on right now. The grey and black interspersed with bright red and white makes us wonder if the designer was colorblind. If the website designers were thinking of recreating a brutalist website design, they have failed miserably at it. This website has no sense of minimalism. The pages are overcrowded with content and low-res pictures, which make browsing a pain. Also, the logo on the main page does not match the logo on the rest of the pages.

9. Headhunter Hair Styling

The old website of this business must have been owned and designed by a surfboarder who is a hairstylist during the off-seasons. The background of sea beaches and the badly tiled ocean views made it seem more like a beach vacation site. The current website, while an improvement, is still very basic and slow to load. You will not love it if you are browsing from your mobile phone. The home page is a refurbished intro page with a basic slider featuring stock images. It is a sheer wastage of bandwidth. The company could have easily done without the first page and started directly with their stylist listings.

10. Alfred Sung Eyewear

After a lot of complaints about this high-brow eye-wear brand website, we decided to check it out ourselves. The main page threw us in a tizzy. The Mystery Meat Navigation in the home page is beyond convenient for users, and we don’t blame the ones who leave after a few attempts of accessing their design catalogs. The biggest problem may be the use of Flash in the home page that is not compatible with most Firefox browsers. As a matter of fact, you may be lead to a void if your Flash doesn’t work. It will baffle you, frustrate you and turn on the rage.

11. Electrifying Times

From flashing GIFs to spinning signs, this monstrosity of an electric car website has it all. You will never miss a word with its flashy animations and meaningless font choices. The website is filled with negative spaces (not used in a clever way) and embedded video players that cover relevant information. The website is far from being optimized for mobile devices. And it makes you recheck the calendar to see if you have traveled back in time. The design is a remnant of the early 2000s and the website is a pain to navigate.

12. University of Advancing Technology

The moment you hear Advancing and Technology together, you expect a website that will inspire awe. Well, far from awe, this inspired fear thinking about the graduates that will be produced from the University. If you are accessing it from IE then it’s easy to question your internet connection speed. But in reality, it is pretty gruesome. You can hardly find any information you are looking for and do not be surprised if the home page takes about 5 seconds to start loading.

13. Penny Juice

In the beginning, the website looks harmless enough. But as you delve deeper, you unearth the horrors that will make you scream and hope for a re-screening of The Conjuring for detox. Once you are in, your monitor will explode from all the colors. But in spite of all the distinct colors the font choice leaves every bit of info illegible. If they were trying to be clever by including a juice concentrate theme for their website, they did it horribly wrong. The trauma will keep you off Penny Juice for a while.

14. irishwrecksonline.net

This could somewhat qualify as a minimal, brutalist website if it had all the responsiveness and animation in place. We again sadly proclaim the use of animation that takes quite a few seconds to load and the lack of user-friendly navigation features. The links are crazy and makes you wonder if you suddenly suffered from amnesia attacks after clicking the logos on the main page. This is a truly strange website that keeps the purpose a mystery.

15. Arngren

Once your eyes settle and start finding pattern in the chaos, you may unearth some precious gems in here. But the initial shock is too much for many. An average first time user lasts about 2 seconds on this worst website before leaving in horror. The content and layout is too overwhelming. We think, this website has great potential and content that is in immediate need of some spring cleaning.

16. Serene Naturist

If the pictures of stone busts and random butterflies dancing around the screen do not get you in the mood for a massage, do not blame yourself. Far from curing your headache, the layout, choice of fonts and the navigation options of the Serene Naturist website can give you a fresh headache. Also, we are really not sure if including pictures of naked butts and bare chests sends out the right kind of message to their prospective clientele.

17. P&M computers, Inc

When a company promises you computer servicing and software solutions, you expect them to do a better job with their website at least. Their choice of background is terrible and we think, this is the mother-load of all pointless intro pages of all websites. This worst website is too heavy for any internet connection and the main page primarily consists of nothing but the P&M Computers logo. They can simply include that in the header or a slider and say ‘goodbye’ to the slow intro page altogether.

18. Ling’s Cars

This worst website will give you a taste of the 70s, the LSD and Molly trips, and not in a good way! The neon backgrounds and music that would have made Helen Keller see and hear. The entire purpose of the website is offering cars for leases, but with the trotting chickens and Dalek webcams, you will hardly have the attention span to notice any. It is utter mayhem that rages throughout the website, and obscures the actual content and services offered by Ling’s.

19. Paradise with a View

Once you have seen their worst website, your desire for spending a sunny vacation in Hawaii will run towards obliteration. The photos on their home page are of various sizes, and the fonts become progressively smaller as you scroll down the page. The rainbow hues in each level of the content does not help much either. Flashing texts in fuchsia, non-responsive templates and squat navigation options placed in the middle of the home page will definitely make you rethink about what Paradise is meant to look like. When you are about to book a vacation your body and mind are crying for some much-needed peace. But a single visit to the website is enough to rob you of your remaining bit of calmness.

20. Mednat.org

Let us not be judgmental for once since they are selling alternative medicine. But their choice of colors, fonts and uncountable number of links to Wikipedia makes you wonder if the designers have ever seen another working website in their entire lives? Clicking on the “Site Search” option opens a new tab that takes quite a few seconds to load.

Scrolling down each page is a tedious affair and we are fairly sure that one page contains 20 pages worth of data and information. There is repetition of content and the sheer lack of weeding out unnecessary content. The entire design and layout is dismal and it sure doesn’t do any good for our immediate mental health status.

21. Where To Eat

The next time your kid, or anyone in your circle, asks a definition of ‘scattered all over the place’ say no more and point them in this websites direction. On another day, you may choose this website to teach your kids alphabets, which are literally all you’ll see after you scroll down. One thing which instantly lit us up, however, was where to eats decision in favor of updating their website. If only they had asked us foodies a while ago, their red and white life would have been much more colorful by now.

22. Industrial Painter

It’s hard to understand how an organization dealing in the business of colors aka paints, can choose blue as their websites dominant color. And note it, these are the kind of blues that will choke your eyes out. What’s worth having a split for is there righthand tab leading one to the HTML site. Point in question is why go for a flash website when it is not flashy at all?

23. http://uglytub.com/

Well, at least the name of this website sums our views correctly about their layout. It’s infuriatingly random and annoying distribution of information will have you believe that a kindergarten kid could actually design a website. No kidding. Consider a good chunk of right hand side filled with paras highlighted as some selected paras on a word doc. Now you believe us.

24. Jamilin

Who is Jami Lin? No, that’s not curiosity talking. It’s the kind of eenie meenie the banner of this website plays on visitors, what with five feminine faces. It appears like a first-hand teaser into what a dot com doom would look like. Plus, highlighting keywords with bold shades of blue sure as heaven is enough to make one run for life while he can.

25. Gates N Fences

Who is Jami Lin? No, that’s not curiosity talking. It’s the kind of eenie meenie the banner of this website plays on visitors, what with five feminine faces. It appears like a first-hand teaser into what a dot com doom would look like. Plus, highlighting keywords with bold shades of blue sure as heaven is enough to make one run for life while he can.

26. Penny Juice

If only they had cared a penny, we mean a dime, about the website, we wouldn’t be here talking about this one. Penny Juices web layout is when you teach a kid Paintbrush and he goes all google eyed, picking whatever color that comes to his mind and dabbing it on the blank sheet. We must mention, this inspiration could have come from that toddler on their banner asking, ‘Who is Penny?’ Are we any different? No. Same is our question still.

27. Bolen Report

There is a way here for you to learn how old newspapers were edited. Or better yet, what layout designs the news world beginners would have had rejected. Going black and white is also an art, even though black and white are not considered as colors. There is a reason we kept what we kept away from you. It is the old Bolen Report website built on Microsoft Front Page. As it turns out some people really don’t learn from their old mistakes.

28. 007 Museum

Bless our fates for 007 is fictional. Had he been real we would know instantly just where he would be headed next, but not before trying to figure out what exactly this website has been using his name for. There are high chances he would simply stab himself just looking at those bold blue headlines. If all goes well, the only thing making to the museum will be this cringeworthy website.

29. Rudgwick Steam Show

This one can go down the course material of top graphics and web building institutes as a case study on what definitely should not be done. Consider the numbering they have used to depict the categories. It’s an acute case of language barrier, with the least amount of heed paid to all that meets the eye. Just like we have no idea what we are doing on their website, they have no idea what they are doing on web either.

30. Internet Archaeology

Beware for this website might give you a quick heart attack, leaving you under the impression that your dearest laptop is under a hacker’s attack. For all you know it is not. Quite like everything else on this website, for no reason at all, a silly, totally trash audio will get automatically downloaded. It’s hard to save oneself from that fete.

31. Constellation 7

We have no idea either what made them think an overdose of colors would depict their genre better. Having said that one would need at least a thousand blinks to reestablish their eyesight. While there is no guarantee of their prophecies, salvations and completely ridiculously put scriptures, their business can see better days with a slightly decently done and established website.

32. Bavarian Brathaus

The biggest failure in the history of html website coding would be Bavarian Brathaus. While the times sure are strongly pointing towards DIY, there is no reason to blindly follow the trend when the stakes of landing your business into a pit are high. Coming back to the point about failure in html, the codes and bars are pretty up there, right in the sight. And just what’s up with the brick background and tamarind mascot. Chill out Bavarian Brathaus.

33. Meciame

Ready for a good laugh? This one has had over three hundred and eighty million views in spite of being voted one of the worst websites. And now we know why. The worst there is to learn about the kind a worst website should be, take the notes right off this one. Though a yellow over blue color scheme sure might lend a 70s vibe, the images will leave you feeling dumped with web poop.

34. Water Equipment

Coming straight of a Windows XP PowerPoint presentation, water equipment’s website is the kind of extra ppt slide you use to dump all the useless or under process information in. The overtly abused color scheme in every webpage you land, backed by the background images will only make you assume which one will fade and which one will fly in or float in or split or wipe.

35. Patimex

The only thing which lifted our spirits was the fact that the root cause of this websites existence still is the sentiments attached to it. It’s difficult to understand what and why. The realization coming handy off this website is the fact that special effects in the brand name are not cool, especially when backed by music. Off script, their new website is a sigh of relief still.

36. The Room Movie

No doubt the IMDB rating of this movie called The Room is only two stars out of five. Had there been a similar rating for this website, the numbers would have been in negative. Though, they definitely need someone to explain that an excessive use of ‘coming soon’ would not make the ‘coming soon’ come sooner. And just what’s with the center alignment and bold highlight? The Room Movie, take a break already.

37. Cloud9 Walkers

The worst example of creativity block can be seen right on this website. Adding a background image with cloudy sky for a website called cloud 9 is simply brilliant. If at all adding one had been extremely important, as it appears, a smarter, pleasanter image would have changed the game for better. Or not, like they say, a lot goes into building a structure and almost nothing into breaking one. And this one’s been long broken.

38. Monkzone

With such flashy a name, one’s hopes are sure to soar high just as much as they are to drop below the ground upon landing on their website. With close to no records, count three, even those piano keys on the sides can do nothing to save them from an evident doom. Glad, they served a preliminary warning to give reading those tiny words in electric blue over a black background a miss, for otherwise the less fortunate ones might be crying over their lost sight already.

39. Best Electronic

Reading a horribly written word document would still count as holy grail in front of this worst website. Best electronic, they call themselves, with nothing to prove through their website. Introducing new products with no images whatsoever and a plain set of words counted under information makes it look like a storeroom to stuff their unused/unsold products.

40. Blinkee

Remember the mesmerizing Christmas lights? Blinkees banner is going to give you your worst Christmas nightmare. As a website about body lights, something you will understand after minutes of scrolling up and down, it does nothing to light you up. The interface is vividly disappointing just as much as their payment gateway is purely annoying.

41. 3D Mailbox

Looking at all those websites, apparently, can do one good. It can lend one a keen sight into tracking down a minutely possible element of polish present in something worst. Quite like this website, which in spite of having an incredulous number of nuisances, has one thing good and that thing is its uncluttered layout. Having said that, this one’s got a fine start. If only it takes some ten odd steps left in becoming a good one.

42. Historian Of The Future

Though that name is ought to remind one of all the historian kind of movies out so far, like the braveheart to speak the least, this website will land one in the remains of flux. And no historian in any age can churn out the reason to why exactly have they left the right side of the side blank and soaked in black.

43. SOS Beev FBI

There is a strong resemblance between a spy’s crazy wall and this website. Trying to relay an Ex-FBI agents terrifying ordeal, this website has done more damage to the man than any organization could. Either this website had been born out of absolute amounts of untapped creativity, hence the disappointing scatter, or it had been the stab-in-the-back kind of death of an idea.

44. Alpha1teclabs

What exactly were they thinking? Their fickle mindedness has been evident from the very name of this website. The more scrolls down this page the more evident their fickle mindedness gets. Take, for instance, their choice of colors, which appear quite like a man saying – ‘dude, let’s go VIBGYOR’ and without a thought of his own, the website developer followed.

45. Great Dreams

This one comes bearing as awful a design as one can imagine, only worse. It’s possible they experimented with ideas while developing the website and then left all those experiments- like a single image of a painting, then a small collage of pictures and paintings, followed by a big collage of ghastly images, ending in a series of solo images- when they got bored and dumped the idea on the internet for people to waste their time on after they couldn’t take back theirs.

46. Dokimos

Were they planning on creating a game? Or were they out to make a motion picture? Alas, it was a message from the higher grounds telling people – ‘stay the farthest away from us, you mortals.’ Who knows what their plans had been, the only plan evident through the layout is to stab the onlooker’s eyeballs and knock ‘em out.

47. Ron Oslund

Coming from someone who apparently had no time other than penning a poem on Princess Dianna and posting it on a hideous website, Ron Oslunds own works had a simple case of too-busy-to-finish-what-I-started syndrome. Perhaps, people should learn from his case and walk away with too-busy-to-pass-a-judgement accredit.

48. MORADITO

The prime reason this blog was created must have been to hit the visitors with high doses of nostalgia. But unfortunately, even that job was disgracefully done. And who exactly calls two lines as a blog, no idea at all. Or perhaps, there was no idea until this blog came along. It’s possible the blogger had been playing a game of scribbles and jotted down the output in, what he apparently calls, a blog.

49. Petersbuss

Is it a cruise? Is it a spa? What exactly is it they are selling? Their customers could have spent a minute or two guessing the product had they only put decipherable words. Keeping that aside, who opts for a lime and tangerine combo over a turquoise background? But despite that, feel free to call them and check, at least that has been clearly displayed, in-your-face.

50. Cyberdsignclan

‘Skip-Intro’ is a risk worth taking if there is a dying urge to know what the 50th worst website in the world looks like. A disaster, if it had to be summed in two words. That aside, this one appears quite fond of left alignment, or perhaps that’s all they cared to use. And boy, do they provide an option to download their website as a ‘Micro$oft Powerpoint’. At your own risk, please.

This list of 50 worst websites in 2020 tell you exactly what not to do when you take your business and services online. If you are still unsure about your website design, but at the same time you do not want to make the same mistakes these website owners made, feel free to contact us.