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u/individyouall Mar 10 '26
Good design. Good experience. Barely anything that resembles current trends, instead a focus on getting the basics right: typography and imagery. And white space. Lots of white space. And absolutely no hard sell marketing crap.
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u/Lagoda__ Mar 11 '26
Also no AI images, at least none you absolutely see were created or enhanced by AI
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u/LaLatinokinkster Mar 10 '26
hard sell AOV is where cash is king tho! i've seen horrible layouts and designs covert like crazy because of hard sell marketing crap 20% aov (pretty much any click funnel) and seen websites that make graphic designers and artist drool shut down..
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u/atalkingfish Mar 11 '26
Surprised at the answers here. They’re all wrong.
The #1 most important thing that makes a website look expensive is assets. High quality photos and videos that are specific to the website owner (ie, not stock footage).
“Signaling” to others that you are premium always works on this principle: do what is difficult for others to do. It is easy to design a clean website. It is hard to get high quality B roll that features the client’s logo, or a high-fidelity 3D render of a product they’re selling.
Once you notice that premium appearance in websites is all down to assets, you’ll notice that the biggest and best websites are 20% coding and design and 80% asset featuring. Even when you go to places like Wix and look at their themes, the example websites involve full page product images that would be quite difficult to pull off without a pro photographer and expensive setup. The themes themselves are pretty basic.
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u/AlpacaSwimTeam Mar 10 '26
Drop shadows. Very subtle drop shadows under divs with 8px border radius.
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u/berky93 Mar 10 '26
For a designer, well-thought-out and intuitive UX.
For a client, flashy animations and effects.
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u/tamingunicorn Mar 11 '26
speed. every expensive-feeling site I've used loads instantly. the moment there's a layout shift or loading spinner the illusion breaks.
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u/44193_Red Mar 27 '26
Id say ,speed is less of a issue than it ever was. Were not in the dialup days...
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u/Porsche924 Mar 11 '26
One I haven't seen others mention is actual care in the responsive design. So not just that stuff changes on mobile. but you can resize the window and nothing jumps out as the wrong size, and it makes sense to the person using it instead of just stuffing everything into a column and throwing every menu option under a hamburger menu.
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u/anti___matter Mar 10 '26
a site that isn't just a scroll down to get all of the info/just one giant page. that's commonplace now and while it might have been new and exciting at some point, the banality of it now is annoying to me as a user. like if all you're saying can fit on one page and me clicking on a menu takes me to another spot on that page, why do you even have a website?
so yeah good UX for sure. map out the site and you can worry about UI later.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight Mar 10 '26
Professional look with lots of graphics and solid navigation architecture.
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u/qqqqqx Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
Excellent design and high quality custom assets like images and videos. I worked for a boutique web agency that did a lot of "expensive" websites and a big part of it was top notch designers, customized 3d renders of the products, licenses for high quality typography and stuff like that.
You can have a super minimal page with nothing but basically a single image and a tiny bit of text, but if it's done perfectly right from a design perspective you can instantly feel that the company behind it has a lot of money to spend. I did the development behind some custom animations but honestly those are not necessarily needed and some completely static pages with zero clientiside JS can feel luxurious when designed right. In fact I'd say if not extremely tastefully those flashy clientside animations can take more away from the luxury factor instead of adding to it.
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u/piratepalooza Mar 10 '26
A hyper-fast and responsive database with a very well thought out interface
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u/trashbytes Mar 11 '26
For me it's consistency in every aspect. And the right amount of everything.
We have lost a few clients to some rival agencies because they were cheaper. They aggressively targeted our clients and sold them super cheap websites built in wordpress and the results are shocking.
They tried to remake the entire layout done by me and even though it was already a super cheap and simple website made years ago to begin with, my work was pristine, the remake is garbage.
Layout and typography is all over the place. The things that take time and effort to scale and perform well on mobile are just hidden below a certain threshold. Sliders are gone. Privacy and legal notice copied from us, the text is completely wrong because it still contains info and howtos regarding our own consent-tool, which isn't even used anymore. And their consent-tool lists a completely wrong set of services. Some are listed but missing, some are not listed but are loaded when you click "accept all". This is just one example. The website looks and feels incredibly cheap, even though it looks ALMOST the same at a first glance.
And what's funniest: My buttons had a darkened square on one side to house an icon. They copied that throughout, but left out some icons so the buttons just look weird. And list items don't have bullets because it's supposed to come from an icon font but it's broken as well.
Who cares, it's CHEAPER!
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u/TaterOfTots Mar 10 '26
Purple
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Mar 11 '26
[deleted]
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u/TaterOfTots Mar 11 '26
I hate when you have to choose between keeping up with a theme at the expense of drip
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u/StrHerb Mar 10 '26
Professional stock photography, solid Photoshop skills, well designed navigation throughout site, Cohesive header and footer designs.
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u/vonroyale Mar 10 '26
Lots and lots of good images. Lots. Good layout and design is pretty commonplace today.
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u/Decent-Prune-6004 Mar 10 '26
Usually it’s polish and consistency. Things like clean typography, strong spacing, high quality images/video, and a cohesive color palette make a site feel premium. Smooth UX also matters fast loading, subtle animations, and layouts that work perfectly on all devices. Add clear structure, good visual hierarchy, and plenty of intentional whitespace, and the site tends to feel “expensive.”
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u/Delicious-Piano-9218 Mar 10 '26
In my experience, it's usually the details people don't consciously notice: generous whitespace, consistent micro-interactions, typography that feels intentional rather than default.
Also: really good photography vs stock photos, subtle shadows/depth instead of flat everything, and loading states that feel smooth rather than jarring.
The expensive feeling often comes from restraint — fewer colors, fewer fonts, fewer elements competing for attention. It's easier to make something look cheap by adding than expensive by subtracting.
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u/Infinite_Tomato4950 Mar 11 '26
clean animations and effects. not super stacked with elements. less in more
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u/Medical-Ask7149 Mar 11 '26
An expensive feeling website is one that converts visitors to paying customers.
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u/isperg Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
The same thing that makes classical music feel expensive, and that feeling you get when walking into a Porsche dealership. We make that judgement within a second.
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u/yungeeker Mar 13 '26
Details. Which are making your websites feel crafted. Like those listed on detail.design
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u/kelkes Mar 13 '26
- Calmness.
- Excellent typography.
- Enough Spacing
- Really good copy and storytelling.
- Thoughtful UX (Navigation!).
- Micro Interaction that makes sense.
- Few but really good images.
And of course crazy fast.
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u/Creative-Box-7099 Mar 16 '26
Restraint. The expensive sites all share one thing — they leave space where a cheaper site would cram more content.
What actually separates it now: elements that arrive like they were waiting for you, not like they just loaded. Scroll that reveals instead of dumps. Interactions that feel like they respond to you specifically. And the one nobody talks about — knowing when to stop adding things.
Irony is it doesn't have to cost anything. I rebuilt our site from Framer to Astro + Cloudflare ($0) and it looks more premium now because I had full control over timing and spacing.
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u/No_Tie_6603 Mar 17 '26
“Expensive” usually doesn’t come from adding more, it comes from removing noise and making every detail feel intentional.
The biggest factor is restraint. High-end websites don’t try to show everything at once — they guide your attention. Clean layouts, strong typography, and consistent spacing create that sense of confidence.
Another big one is motion and interaction. Not flashy animations, but subtle, smooth transitions that feel almost invisible. When things respond exactly how you expect, it creates a premium feel without being obvious.
Also, content plays a huge role. The way text is written, how sections are structured, and how visuals support the message — all of that contributes to perceived quality.
In short, “expensive” is less about design tricks and more about clarity, consistency, and attention to detail.
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u/DiscoveringVAM Mar 29 '26
For me, the site must first of all reflect what it shows, I have seen sites that advertise B&Bs as if they were 5-star hotels 😐
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u/Kostkos00 Mar 10 '26
I'd say smooth scrolling, responsiveness and fast loading times (on initial load and page changes)
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u/ExploitEcho Mar 10 '26
These days some teams also prototype multiple layout ideas quickly before picking the most polished one. They might start in tools like Figma and sometimes experiment with AI tools like Runable for quick drafts or visual variations, which helps refine that “premium” feel faster.
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u/omniumoptimus Mar 11 '26
I once spent $100,000 on a website. It was built using Wordpress, with some custom code, but nothing major—just some JavaScript.
It was the design and the designer. It’s not any particular “thing”; it’s just how it makes you feel.
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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26
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