Is Your Website 2026 Ready?

by Zero Above on 10th July 2026

Creating an impactful website in 2026 requires a blend of user-centric design, cutting-edge technology and strategic content. Here are our top ten crucial features every website should have:

Plan Your Website Redesign with Confidence

At the back of the guide, you’ll find a comprehensive website briefing template to help you plan every detail of your redesign. From defining user groups to selecting hosting options, integrations and essential functionality, our template ensures nothing is overlooked.

With years of experience, our expert team of web designers and developers have helped countless brands launch stunning, high-performing websites. If you’re considering a redesign, we’re here to offer tailored advice and insights to guide you through the process.

1. Top 5 Website Animation Ideas 2026

As we head into 2026, we’ve seen the same kind of trends and inspiration carried through from 2024. Movement, interactivity and 3D design and animation are excellent ways to engage the user and keep them interested (and therefore on the page!) The best websites are interactive and layered, and these are our top 5 micro-interaction tips for 2025:

Get out of the box

Move away from grids, squares and standard-looking websites. Use colour, layers and shapes to create a dynamic look and feel, adding a creative flair to your website. Your website needs to catch the attention of users and beat off your competitors.

Micro-interactions

Various micro-interactions are available, but the most commonly used are interactions on hover to show the user which are interactive elements. You should also think about bringing branding into micro-interactions.

Parallax scrolling

This is one of our favourites to create drama and sophistication into websites! Parallax scroll adds an element of interaction by making images look as though they’re moving as the user scrolls.

Scrollmation

Similar to parallax scroll but using layered images to ‘reveal’ layers as the user scrolls. These types of website are great as campaign landing pages.

Video and animation

Everyone knows how important video is to online marketing these days. There are some key reasons why we think you should build it into your website, but we still see lots of websites without it:

  • Video is a fast, cost-effective way to get your message across and keep people on your website for longer periods
  • Customer testimonial videos could be that last push your audience needs to get over the line and convert. It helps build real-life trust and credibility for your product and brand
  • Storytelling is a crucial part of every brand, and video conveys this in the most emotive way, and can also pick up technical elements of a product or service, often difficult to get across in written form

Sites should be user-friendly across all devices to make the journey as easy as possible for the user. Frustration is one of the main causes of users leaving a site and can drastically impact conversions. UX design principles and best practices are crucial to getting a website design right, so the experience is created with the user in mind from the outset. Prominent CTAs clearly direct the user and encourage conversions, which should be built into the user journey. New websites should also be comprehensively tested across a range of devices and browsers before launch.

The best approach to getting the SEO right on your website is to work with an agency that has an in-house SEO team who work alongside their design and development teams to ensure that your website not only looks and functions well, but also ranks well in Google. By including the SEO team throughout the design and build process, it can also ensure your website’s hierarchy is set up to allow maximum search potential, preventing the need for structural or template changes down the road. By combining the perfect balance of SEO and UX with a conversion-focused approach, you can be confident that your website is set up for long-term organic growth.

A strong visual identity across a website portrays your brand as a trustworthy and established entity. You can spot a website that has had a brand specialist involved in its design, either by building your website around the brand identity or developing a brand world around messaging and tonality. Think about colour palette, typography, iconography, photography and graphic elements around your brand identity to broaden your brand and give it more authority and a unified identity.

Immersive home page banners engage the user as soon as they land on your website and give them an instant feel for your brand. This can be vibrant full-screen photography or even a brand video to showcase your brand to the full. This is something great photographers and videographers are able to bring to life. The imagery has lots of use in social media and marketing too, making your investment well worthwhile.

Real Life Photography and Videography

Photos and videos help users to visualise your brand and allow them to engage and relate on a more personal level. Although stock photography is great for sharp, vibrant imagery, sometimes it’s nice for users to put a face to the name to encourage connection. Investing in the right photographers and videographers can help to get the image you want and display your brand in the best light.

 

Conversion Tracking and Optimisation

Comprehensive, accurate conversion tracking rooted in your objectives is imperative in maximising the efficiency of your digital marketing campaigns — understanding the performance of each channel (down to keyword level in the case of Search) helps in making informed decisions about where your budget is best spent. You should definitely have the basics in place to track conversions through form submissions, email clicks, telephone calls and even engagement metrics, which allows your marketing team or agency to refine and improve, ensuring the best performance possible.

Live Chat

With users being impatient in today’s society, live chat is the perfect way to engage with your audience and give them the answers they’re searching for instantly. Good quality and helpful customer service can help convert visitors by offering security of products or services being sold by your organisation. Allowing a customer to chat to a real person, rather than a robot, to get honest feedback and advice is a great way to encourage sales and boost conversions.

Accessibility

As we move forward in a world where everything is becoming accessible, it’s important to incorporate this thinking into your website too. By ensuring your website is accessible, it means that every single user, including people with disabilities, can access the website and have a good user experience on site. This allows everyone to access any information required and means that no conversions are missed. Zero Above can help with this by adding features to ensure your site matches web content accessibility guidelines.

An Easy-to-Update CMS

One of the key problems new clients cite when we start conversations about a new website is the difficulty they have updating their website through a complex and unintuitive system. The WordPress platform is one of the most favoured content management systems due to its simplicity. 43% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online. One of the main misconceptions of WordPress is that it’s just a blogging platform, which is simply not true. You can completely customise WordPress builds right from the start — transforming any site into a brochure site, a fully integrated API mortgage calculator, or an e-commerce site. Any creative design can be brought to life on the WordPress platform, allowing you to update it as and when you need to.

 

Get in touch to find out how we can help

Website Design Briefing Form

Client Details

  • Contact Name:
  • Phone:
  • Email:
  • Current Website URL:
  • CMS Built In:
  • Current Hosting Package:
  • Rough Sitemap of Pages / Content:
  • Budget:
  • Intended Go-Live Date:

Business Background:

Key Objectives

What is the purpose of the new website?

Why have you decided to redesign your website?

Audience & Users

  • Who are your key user groups?
  • Have you performed any user research? If yes, please specify.
  • Do you have personas? If yes, please specify.

Design

List 3 websites you like (from any industry):

List 3 websites you don’t like (from any industry):

Functional Requirements

  • On your existing website, what works?
  • On your existing website, what doesn’t work?
  • On your existing website, what functionality is lacking?
  • What integrations do you need?

Have You Considered

  • Content Creation and Loading
  • SEO
  • Mobile Responsiveness
  • Hosting Costs

Branding

Are you happy with your current branding?