Every roundup of architecture firm websites is the same slideshow of beautiful homepages, and at this point that isn't much use to anyone. Every architecture firm has a beautiful homepage now. The photography is good, the type is restrained, there's a full-bleed hero image doing exactly what it's supposed to do. That's the floor — it's not what separates one firm from the next anymore.
The more interesting question is what the good ones do on the second page, the one a prospective client reaches at eleven at night, months before they ever pick up the phone. Four things separate them, and none of it has to do with how the site looks.
They give the process real estate
Look at how the strongest firm sites organize their top-level navigation. Projects gets its own section, sure. But there's a second one sitting right next to it — Approach, sometimes Process — and underneath it sit several pages, each doing its own work: how a project actually runs, what each phase produces, how the firm thinks about a site, how it handles sustainability, the kinds of work it takes on.
That's an unusual share of a website to give over to how a firm works, rather than what it makes. It's also the highest-converting decision on a residential architecture site, and the reason is straightforward. A homeowner isn't anxious about whether you can design a good house — they can see that in the photographs. They're anxious about what the next eighteen months of their life are going to be like.
The industry go-to is often a single thin process page with numbered steps. Having multiple pages, on the other hand, says something different and answers questions your competitors are leaving wide open.
They let people filter by the thing they actually care about
The best portfolios have filters so prospective clients don’t have to scroll through forty projects hoping one applies to them. Filtering by condition instead of chronology is a small structural choice, but it's the kind that makes a large portfolio feel like it was put together for one particular person instead of accumulated over a decade. If you've got more than about fifteen projects up and no way to filter them, that's the highest-return change on this list.
The project pages have to say something
Of course your project pages should feature a photo gallery and some details about the project. But which details matter?
Great project pages read more like a short magazine feature: what the site demanded, what the clients needed, what the real constraints turned out to be, and how they got solved. Some firms go further and publish sketches because the drawing itself is an excellent way to show what the firm actually does.
They make the next step obvious, and small
The strongest sites keep a standing FAQ, publish their events, and make contact details easily accessible. An architecture site’s conversion problem is almost never the button. It’s that “Contact” asks somebody to declare themselves ready at the exact moment they aren't sure they are. What works better is a smaller commitment that still counts for something — a named first step, a fee guide, a downloadable process overview, or just a line that says: not sure yet? Here's what a first conversation actually covers.
Where to look
Three galleries are worth the time, each for a different reason. ArchDaily has the widest coverage of firms, and it's the best place to see how peer practices present work comparable to yours. Awwwards sits at the design-forward end — useful for interaction ideas, and a risky place to build a brief from, since plenty of award-winning sites convert badly. Siiimple leans toward restraint, which is usually the right instinct for this industry anyway.
Browse them for structure, not style. The question worth asking while you scroll is what they decided to give a whole page to. The very large practices — Foster + Partners, OMA, Herzog & de Meuron — are worth a look too, for how they handle enormous portfolios. They aren't a model for a six-person residential practice, though. Copying their austerity without their name recognition mostly just reads as a site that forgot to finish.
The failures that outrank all the others
Almost every underperforming architecture site is falling down in two or three of the same places.
Images that aren't sized for phones is the most common: a four-megabyte hero image on a slow connection results in a bounce, and most architecture sites are slow for exactly that reason — it's almost always the photography pipeline, not the design. Close behind it is no real indication of who the firm is for, with project type, budget range, and geography all left unstated, which means the inquiries that do arrive show up unqualified. A portfolio with no writing in it is the biggest missed opportunity of the three, and it's the one covered above. And there's often nothing for search to hold onto — beautiful image-only pages give Google very little to work with, which is the same fix as the writing problem. More on that in our SEO guide for architecture firms.
Before you commission a redesign
The most common thing we end up telling a firm in a first conversation is that they don't need a new site. They need three pages the current site doesn't have, and faster images. If you want a second opinion on which of those you're actually looking at, have a look at the sites we've built, read how we run a web project, or send us your URL and we'll give you the short list.