Websites We Would Fire: Five Digital Failure Archetypes

Every quarter, millions of pounds in corporate capital are committed to web redesigns that look immaculate in Figma presentations but fail completely in production. When a newly launched digital flagship fails to produce commercial pipeline, leadership often points fingers at media spend or the sales team.

In reality, the flaw is almost always architectural. Most agency redesigns simply swap one set of outdated templates for another, wrapping the same broken information hierarchy in fashionable gradients and heavy JavaScript animations.

"Committee compromises manifest as horizontal carousels. When leadership cannot choose a single value proposition, they force designers into carousels."

— Avorria Studio Observation

The symptom is unmistakable: an auto-advancing banner rotating through four unrelated marketing campaigns. Research has documented for over a decade that fewer than one percent of visitors ever engage with any slide beyond the first.

Beyond destroying message clarity, carousels devastate Core Web Vitals. The underlying slider script delays Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) by up to 2.4 seconds while parsing image assets that mobile users never see.