Motion on Websites

Not Everything on a Website Needs to Move

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Out of all the web design trends for 2026, motion is the one that’s stood out to me the most.

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Banners that won’t stop moving, images shifting at different speeds, backgrounds moving as you scroll, and buttons bouncing for attention.

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A lot of businesses are using animation to make their websites feel more dynamic, interactive, and engaging. Sometimes it works. Motion can guide attention, create visual hierarchy, and make a website feel more alive.

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But I think we’ve started to confuse movement with good design.

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Because when everything moves, it becomes harder to focus on what actually matters.

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When motion becomes a barrier

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As someone with ADHD, I find overly animated websites genuinely difficult to process. When I’m trying to read about something and elements keep moving around the page, I stop reading the content and start tracking the movement instead. No matter how hard I try to avoid it, my eyes can’t help but drift away from the thing I’m actually trying to read and towards the shiny, moving banner instead

Sometimes it makes me feel physically sick.

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I was looking at a website recently, trying to work out whether a service was right for me. There was a parallax background shifting behind the text, a counter animating upwards in the corner, and a banner sliding across the top of the screen. I closed the tab within about 30 seconds. Not because the service wasn’t right, but I couldn’t concentrate long enough to find out.

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And it’s not just ADHD. Motion-heavy websites can also create real difficulty for people with vestibular disorders who may suffer from vertigo, brain fog, migraines, and motion sensitivity. For some people, a constantly animated page isn’t just distracting. It can cause genuine physical discomfort.

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The problem isn’t motion. It’s control.

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I’m not saying motion is bad and that it should be thrown into a virtual recycling bin. When it’s used well, animation can genuinely improve a user’s experience. It can draw attention to something important, confirm that an action has worked, or help someone understand how a page is structured.

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But the important word that seems to be missed across the web when motion is implemented is intention.

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Not every element needs to move, and not every website needs to feel like an interactive playground.

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The issue usually isn’t the movement itself.

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It’s when users lose control over it.

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When animation starts the moment someone lands on a page, runs continuously in the background, and can’t be paused or skipped, users are no longer in charge of their own experience. That’s where motion stops being a design choice and starts becoming a barrier.

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Small changes that make a real difference

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The good news is that designing with motion more inclusively doesn’t mean stripping everything back. It usually just means giving users a bit more agency.

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Here are some things that can genuinely help:

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• Offering a pause button for moving content, especially banners or background animations
• Avoiding autoplaying effects that fire the second someone arrives on a page
• Using carousels and sliders with clear manual controls rather than auto-rotation
• Respecting reduced motion preferences in your CSS where you can

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These are not huge changes. But they make a real difference to people who are easily overstimulated, or who are just trying to focus.

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Sometimes calm is the point

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As designers, I think we sometimes forget that attention is already being pulled in so many directions online. People arrive at websites tired, distracted, and overwhelmed. They don’t always need more to look at.

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Sometimes the most effective thing a website can do is just be clear. Calm. Easy to move through without feeling like you’re being performed at.

Not everything needs to move to feel engaging.

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Sometimes the most usable thing a website can be is calm.

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