I’ve been designing and building WordPress sites for over a decade, and the stuff that actually separates new designers from experienced ones isn’t taste. It’s a handful of boring decisions they make consistently on every project: color, images, SEO basics, page weight, and what they do when a client gives feedback.

Below are the seven tips I’d give myself if I were starting over, with the real reasoning behind each.

1. Keep your color palette small

Beginner designs almost always use too many colors. I’ve watched new designers pick 4 brand colors, add 3 accents, a gradient, two neutral shades for text, and then wonder why the page feels noisy.

Aim for:

• One primary brand color
• One accent (used for CTAs only)
• Two neutrals (one for backgrounds, one for text)
• White or near-white as the page canvas

That’s four or five colors total. Bright color should be a scarcity signal. It tells the eye “this matters.” If everything is colorful, nothing is.

A color palette generator or Tailwind’s default palette are both solid starting points. Pick one and stop fiddling.

2. Treat stock photos as a last resort

Nothing dates a site faster than generic stock photography. If the budget allows, commission or shoot real photos of the client’s product, team, or workspace. If it doesn’t, crop tightly, use only partial images, and lean on illustration, diagrams, or typography instead.

When you do use stock, edit every image:

• Crop to fit the layout, don’t squeeze the layout around the image
• Match the color temperature to the rest of the site
• Export as WebP at 80% quality (smaller files, better Core Web Vitals)
• Add descriptive alt text (see point 3)

3. Learn enough SEO to not shoot yourself in the foot

You don’t need to be an SEO expert. You do need to know the basics or you’ll actively damage sites you hand to clients.

The bare minimum:

• One <h1> per page, and it should match what the page is actually about
• <h2> and <h3> tags should nest logically. Don’t skip levels for styling reasons
• Every meaningful image needs descriptive alt text (also helps accessibility)
• URL slugs should be short and readable. I wrote a full explainer on SEO slugs
• Every site needs a working XML sitemap, even a 5-page brochure site. Walkthrough on finding or creating a sitemap

If you’re building on WordPress, install Rank Math or Yoast and spend an afternoon reading their docs. You’ll save clients months of wasted SEO work later.

4. Design for the task, not the vibe

New designers optimize for how a design looks in their portfolio. Experienced designers optimize for whether the user can actually complete the task the page exists for.

Before laying anything out, answer:

• What is the one thing this page exists to do?
• What action should the user take first?
• What would make them bounce or get confused?

Then design backward from the answer. A pricing page with 14 animated cards is worse than a boring three-column comparison table that actually converts.

5. Respect page weight

Every kilobyte matters. A homepage that’s 5MB on desktop will be 8MB on a mid-range Android after you add headers, tracking, and ads. That’s an LCP disaster and a Core Web Vitals fail waiting to happen.

Defaults I use on every build:

• Max image file size: 200KB (WebP or AVIF)
• Max custom fonts: 2 weights, self-hosted
• Lazy-load images below the fold
• No hero carousel unless the stakeholder signed off on the performance cost

In WordPress specifically, your theme choice sets the performance ceiling. I cover that in how your theme impacts SEO rankings and my roundup of fast-loading themes. For tactical speed fixes after the build, my speed optimization guide on SmartWP covers the plugin and caching side.

6. Use whitespace like it’s the most expensive element on the page

New designers treat whitespace as wasted space. Experienced designers treat it as a design element with its own job: creating hierarchy, grouping related content, and giving the eye somewhere to rest.

Three rules I use on every project:

• Group related elements, separate unrelated ones (proximity creates meaning)
• Double the padding you think a section needs, then check it on mobile
• Never let text touch a container edge

Cleaner layouts read as more credible, more premium, and easier to scan. Users stay on the page longer, which feeds back into rankings over time.

7. Ask for specific feedback, not general approval

“What do you think?” is the worst question you can ask a client. You’ll get “I don’t know, can you make it pop more?” every time.

Better questions:

• On this page, is it clear what action we want the user to take?
• Is there anything here that feels confusing or slow to understand?
• If you had 5 seconds on this page, would you know what we do?

Specific questions force specific answers. Specific answers make actionable revisions. Vague feedback is mostly your fault for asking a vague question.

A note on building for yourself

If you’re a new designer building your own portfolio site or blog, you’re also the developer, the writer, the SEO person, and the marketer. That’s a lot. If you’re picking a WordPress theme for a personal blog, Ryan Robinson’s guide is a solid starting point, and if you want a tool that helps with the content side once you’re ranking, I built RightBlogger for that workflow.

Design skills compound. Every project you finish makes the next one faster. None of the tips above are shortcuts. They’re the stuff I wish I’d taken seriously on project one instead of project fifty.