15 Wireframe Examples and How to Make Your Own
By Oliver May 21, 2024
You can’t build a city without planning anything; the same is true for websites! Website wireframe examples help you plan your website so you can demo designs before they go live.
To help you put your designs to the test, we’ve put together a guide to website wireframes including examples and how you can get started.
We’ve even sprinkled in website design trends to keep you modern and relevant!
What is a wireframe?
Wireframes are a fundamental tool in the web design process, serving as simplified visual representations of a website’s layout and functionality.
By mapping out the arrangement of webpage elements such as headers, footers, imagery placement, and content, wireframes provide a path for defining user interface (UI) and interaction for desktop and mobile applications.
Consider this: 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience. Emphasizing structure and navigation early in the design process ensures that the user experience (UX) is a pleasant interaction for users.
Why you should use wireframes
Wireframes ensure everyone’s aligned on the website’s structural goals, streamlining decision-making. By adopting wireframes, teams can avoid extensive revisions in later stages, leading to more efficient project timelines and a deeper focus on meeting user expectations.
So, wireframes save you time, effort, and other resources – who doesn’t want that?
Wireframe size guidelines
Users may access your website on various devices, like mobile phones, desktops, tablets, laptops, etc. These devices have different screen sizes, so it’s critical to tailor your website’s design to accommodate these differences.
Since Google prioritizes mobile-first websites in search results, ensuring your website works across all platforms, not just desktops, is super important. In industry terms, this is known as website optimization.
Here are some common wireframe size guidelines to consider:
- A smartphone screen: 1080px wide x 1920px long
- A tablet screen: 8” Tablet – 800px wide x 1280px long or 10” Tablet – 1200px wide x 19200px long
- A desktop screen: 768px wide x 1366px long
Accommodating different screen sizes ensures that essential components like your headers, call-to-actions (CTA), images, navigation bar, etc. are visible and functional, regardless of the device used.
How to create a wireframe
Source: careerfoundry.com
Now that you know:
- What a wireframe is
- Why you need wireframes
- The different wireframe sizes
You’re ready to start creating them for your website. Here’s a step-by-step guide for building a wireframe.
1. Clarify your business objectives
Different businesses come with different websites. A B2B SaaS platform has a very different layout from your local restaurant or even a large retail brand.
Look at the differences between Gong, a B2B AI platform, and Chobani, the popular yogurt, creamer, and oat milk brand.
For Gong, the business objective on the homepage is to educate visitors on the platform and provide trust signals, and examples of how you can find value in the tool.
For Chobani, the business objective is to showcase its different products and make it easy for visitors to find exactly what item they need.
In unique ways, both websites do a great job of building their business outcomes while also following web design trends. Now, clarify your business objective to hone in on your website wireframe.
2. Determine your website’s primary function
Your business goals will guide your website’s primary function. This, in turn, will inform your wireframing process.
Maybe you want to gear your website towards increasing the views of your blog. If that’s the case, it makes sense to feature blog posts somewhere early on your website’s homepage. Like CNET’s website layout!
On the other hand, if you run an e-commerce website, it wouldn’t make sense to feature your blog posts so early on (or at all). Instead, your wireframe should emphasize transactional decisions much earlier, like Bread Beauty’s homepage below.
3. Start hand-sketching simple wireframes
Once you’ve nailed your business objectives and the page’s primary function, you must understand how a user will flow through it. Think or sketch out how a user may enter the landing page, what you want them to see, and where they might go next.
For example, the popular beverage company, De Soi, kept users top of mind during the design process. Within their homepage, they make it easy for customers to add products to their carts or even subscribe to receive products periodically, all in one place.
4. Sketching low-fidelity wireframes
The trick here is to keep things simple, this version of the wireframe is meant to be low-resolution. Start by creating blocks for where you want text, images, buttons, or other design elements to live.
If you prefer the digital route, Figma is a great tool that many designers use for both low and high-fidelity wireframes. Start to think more about the content you need to include and where it would go, plus some simple user decision flows.
5. Increase the resolution of your wireframe (high-fidelity)
Web design progression starts from low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes and results in the final design.
Once you’ve sketched a basic layout for your website page(s), it’s time to add in some detail. This is often where designers move to digital platforms like Miro or Figma and add context to their wireframes.
Begin by laying out your wireframe according to the specific dimensions you want. We recommend starting with the device that your traffic most often uses. This way, you’ll get a better sense of how information will be organized for your users, and the size of logos, headers, and images.
As you work on your wireframe, keep coming back to the user flow and ensuring their journey is conducive to the goals of your website.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- How are users entering this page?
- What conversion steps do I want a user to take?
- Are these steps intuitive and easy to follow?
- Is anything on the page redundant or confusing?
6. Gather feedback and iterate
When you’ve completed your high-fidelity wireframe, it doesn’t stop there. You can rarely go through this entire process without needing to iterate and make changes. Gather feedback to implement into the designs.
You might end up with multiple wireframe versions before beginning the final website build. Take time during this stage since it can save you time and headaches down the road!
15 Wireframe examples for websites and mobile (Low to high-fidelity)
To give you a sense of the entire front-end website design process, we’ve prepped wireframe examples from low-fidelity sketches to finished website mockups with beautiful UI.
1. Desktop low-fidelity wireframe sketch
Source: Earth Tribe Wireframes on Dribbble
Sketch out a simple and rough sketch of your website page that blocks sections for elements like; text, images, and CTAs. It also includes references to the most basic information.
2. Mobile and app wireframe sketch
Source: Miro
Similar to the desktop wireframe but for mobile, this format is a hand-drawn sketch of the basic grids and structure for how you want your layout to look on mobile devices and apps.
3. Low-fidelity desktop wireframe
Source: assets-global.website-files.com
A digital website wireframe example that’s simple with basic, descriptive tags. The crossbars in the empty boxes generally represent image locations in UI design. This format is great for blogging and e-commerce businesses selling products.
4. Low-fidelity, product or service full website wireframe
Source: gravitatedesign.com
Here’s a perfect wireframe example of multiple-page layouts for a website in a simple, digital format. It covers everything from products and customer reviews to services and a blog page.
5. Low-fidelity, e-commerce mobile wireframe
Source: Alicia Rodriguez on Dribbble
If you’re building a new website entirely or re-designing an existing one, ensuring all page wireframes live in the same place will make it much easier to get a broad idea of how everything will flow together. This wireframe example is for mobile websites.
6. Low-fidelity mobile user flow wireframe
Source: Oluwadamilola Banjo on Dribbble
When building a specific section of your website, you might want to wireframe an entire user flow, something that we discussed above. This wireframe example walks through exactly what requesting a demo will look like to a user in a lo-fi format.
7. High-fidelity business website wireframe example
Source: productschool.com
With high-fidelity wireframes, you begin adding images, copy, logo fonts, and brand colors to create a high-fidelity wireframe. It adds your brand identity to the mix and gives you a better idea of how your website reflects your business.
8. High-fidelity desktop interactive wireframe
For some high-fidelity wireframes, you might add an interactive element to it. This helps to test user flows and catch inconsistencies or areas of confusion early on. Interactive wireframes are most commonly used in product design.
9. Mobile high-fidelity wireframe
Source: Emma Houghton on Dribbble
As mentioned earlier, you must produce wireframes for both mobile and desktop. The above is an example of a high-fidelity wireframe for mobile, key areas like the menu, text size, and content blocks will be different compared to desktop.
10. Interactive high-fidelity mobile wireframe
Source: Sajon for Orix Creative on Dribbble
An interactive website wireframe helps portray various animations, like expanding images or fading text. Sometimes the animations are part of the whole user experience and are necessary to help the brand experience come through.
Make sure to keep everything else simple if you rely on animated transitions on your website!
Wireframe mockups and website examples
Source: Laurent NDG for Spendesk
Let’s look at the final result of a website wireframe: a high-fidelity website mockup with all information and brand elements populated.
11. Service-based business wireframe
Bud Thomas for Focus Lab on Dribbble
This finalized brand website shows a variation of homepage options. Notice the subtle differences in the information that’s fed to a user and the location of different chunks in each version.
12. SAAS website wireframe
Source: Erşad Başbağ for Flowbase on Dribbble
Notice how this website wireframe includes a section above the fold highlighting impressive facts about the service. Having customer testimonials that highlight what current clients like about working with this business improves trust and conversion.
13. Consulting website wireframe
Service-based websites need to highlight the services available as well as the value proposition and some success metrics at the very top. This instantly creates a professional and trustworthy appeal.
Source: BB agency on Dribbble
Mobile wireframes need to keep things clear and simple, but impactful. This mobile website wireframe example uses captivating copy and a simple CTA button as its main page. Keeping images and text to a minimum can help your mobile site load faster and boost your small business SEO.
14. Fashion and beauty website wireframe
Source: Anam Khoirul on Dribbble
Colorful and disjointed, this website wireframe example has a simple layout but shows its personality through pops of color, a unique serif font, and lively photography. Having elements that stray from traditional formatting can help make a lasting impression and show off a quirky brand.
15. Bold eCommerce website wireframe
Source: Adhiari Subekti on Dribbble
eCommerce is competitive and cut-throat, so having a fast-loading and simple layout is key to getting people sold and checked out. This website wireframe uses brand colors and visuals to create a bold presence, and a simple layout with tons of white space to not overwhelm the viewer.
What to include in a website wireframe
Plan out your content hierarchy
Your website goals will dictate what content needs to appear where, and in what order of priority. Our brains work best when information is organized efficiently from one logical step to another.
Think carefully about what information you want your user to see, and the level of priority you want to give it. Cluttered, busy, and confusing
Lean on grids, templates, and UI kits
There are thousands of free wireframe templates out there that can save you time. Beyond that, you could also use a UI kit. This is a website template that comes with different page layout options. Two that we recommend are:
Use fewer images, lazy-loading, and optimize your final website
Too many images, excessive image size and resolution, videos, and loading styles can all affect the performance of your website. This is important since search engines don’t like slow-loading websites.
When you’re wireframing, take into consideration the number of images and their resolution, and explore ways to optimize your website’s loading speed for better results.
Space is your best friend
Negative space in logo design is a great way to establish a visual hierarchy and guide your user’s attention. The same principles apply to website design and should be a factor in your wireframe.
Free website wireframe tools
If you’re ready to get started building your wireframe, here are a few of our favorite free wireframe tools to get you started.
- Miro: Miro is a well-known and popular tool for collaborating on wireframes. It’s pretty easy to use and accessible for multiple team members.
- Adobe XD: Adobe XD has a ton of great wireframe templates for beginners and expert designers alike.
- Figma: Another collaborative interface design platform that helps teams create wireframes together. Figma has some cool user flow and decision-tree features that are simple and well-visualized.
- Wireframe.cc: A super simple grid wireframe tool that will literally have you building wireframes on the website’s homepage. Super simple to get started on.
Beginner-friendly website wireframe templates
Looking for free, beginner-friendly UI kits to get started? We’ve listed some top options for you below.
Basic Lo-fi wireframing kit
Source: Vijay Verma on dribbble
An incredible starting point, this free lo-fi wireframing kit is a great start for any project in any industry and format. Download it now!
Ecommerce UI Kit
Prospero, a Webflow eCommerce UI kit
An awesome beginner UI kit with tons of great pre-built assets. It’s clean, sophisticated, and ready to roll as an eCommerce website. Check it out here!
Beauty UI Kit
This is a trendy website wireframe that has dynamic text sections that scroll over still images in the background. The background images illustrate product offerings and make scrolling through the website irresistible. It’s edgy and unique – something you need to stand out as a beauty business.
Start wireframing!
Wireframing is an invaluable way to help you make your website better when it goes live. Like much of UX design in general, wireframing is a way to make sure your website works seamlessly, giving your user an effortless, efficient experience.
Keep in mind the following underlying principles when building your wireframe:
- What information will your website include?
- What decisions do you want users to make? Once you’ve built your website, what decisions do they make in reality? Often, user behavior will go against our hypotheses about a website, and this data can be hugely insightful.
- How are you using space in your wireframe?
- Is your wireframe logical? Less random clutter equals less processing power needed from brains and computers alike.
Ultimately, a wireframe’s purpose is to help you think about what a user needs to see before you go ahead and build the whole website.
So good luck, move fast, make mistakes, and have fun wireframing!
Website wireframe FAQs
What is a wireframe in a website?
Website wireframing is the scaffolding for the final structure of your website. It’s there to block out important things like layout, plus any key decisions that you want your users to make along the way.
What should be included in a website wireframe?
In your website wireframe, you should include:
- A logo
- Header text
- Body text
- Search field
- A call to action
- Menu bar
- Images
- White space
How do I wireframe an existing website?
You can wireframe an existing website by zooming out and taking a screenshot from top to bottom. Then, you can use one of the wireframing tools we mentioned above to place the image, and then simply create boxes and placement text while you map out how the website is structured.
What are the three methods for creating website wireframes?
- Low-fidelity
- Mid-fidelity
- High-fidelity