Hero Banner Design: Expert Tips and Best Practices for Web Designers

Core Elements of Effective Hero Banners

A hero banner typically includes: a background image or video that sets the visual tone, a compelling headline that captures your message’s essence, supporting text that provides context, and a clear call-to-action (CTA) button that encourages visitors to take the next step.

Key Design Best Practices

Visual Design Principles

• Use bold, impactful typography with large fonts that dominate the hero section to ensure key information is easily digestible at a glance
• Incorporate high-quality visuals (images, videos, 3D elements) that are eye-catching and relevant to your brand’s story
• Maintain design harmony by carefully selecting fonts, sizes, colours, and visuals that sync with your overall brand identity and guidelines
• Add interactive elements like scroll-triggered animations, hover effects, and micro-interactions to keep users engaged

Content Strategy

• Your hero section has about five seconds to make people care, so focus on delivering your core message quickly and clearly
• Use a confident, friendly, and inviting tone that advertises your product whilst making users feel welcome
• Keep information concise—for example, a slide titled “2025 Doctoral Scholarship Competition” with a “Learn More” CTA is more effective than a slide filled with details

Process for Determining Style Approach

1. Start with Strategy, Not Design

When defining a hero banner strategy, always start with buyer persona development and compare your current website goals to when you initially built your website. Ask yourself: Do you want to drive more sales? Do you have a unique service offering you want visitors to learn more about?

2. Consider Your Brand Positioning

• Make sure your hero image matches the overall feel of your website using similar colours, fonts, and design styles as the rest of your site to help people remember your brand
• Select from four distinct styles that align with your brand identity and the feel you want to convey

3. Image Selection Criteria

Selection criteria for images appropriate for hero banners can be quite complicated. Consider whether there’s a key section of the photograph that will work and if the photograph will function with only a small fraction of detail visible due to responsive scaling.

Common effective image styles include:

• Landscape photography: Frequently used with a strong marketing approach, featuring plenty of depth that allows text to be the focus
• People photography: Requires careful composition where the subject can’t be too close to the camera, showing enough depth for the person to be featured whilst allowing the rest of the banner to breathe
• Minimalist approaches: Sometimes you just need to tell it like it is—simplicity can be incredibly effective

Technical Specifications

Size Guidelines

• For banner hero images, the ideal size is 1600 x 500 pixels, though you may need to size up to 1,800 pixels for crystal-clear images on large screens
• For mobile hero images, use 800 x 1,200 pixels to accommodate vertical phone and horizontal tablet orientations
• Aim for page load times of one to two seconds, as you’ll likely lose visitors if loading exceeds five seconds

Responsive Design

With more users accessing websites via mobile, ensuring your hero section is responsive is essential, and your hero image design must scale appropriately across all devices.

Testing and Optimisation

Evaluate how well your hero banner is performing using tools like Hotjar to see how people interact with the page, and consider A/B testing to create the best-performing page possible. In A/B testing, create two versions of your hero section—a control version with your original design and a variation with one or more changes, such as repositioning the CTA button, changing wording, or choosing different colours.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Common mistakes include using low-quality or irrelevant images, overcrowding the banner with too much text or visual elements, and neglecting to optimise the banner for mobile devices.

Conclusion

This strategic approach emphasises starting with your goals and audience, then selecting visual and content elements that support those objectives whilst maintaining technical excellence across all devices. By following these expert-backed best practices, you’ll create hero banners that not only capture attention but drive meaningful engagement and conversions.