The 5 Best Laptops for Web Designing and Development Reviewed

Whether you’re learning web design, or you already know what you’re doing, the speed of computer innovation can make it difficult to find quality computers to do your work on.

This only gets more complicated when you want a portable option, since laptops have more restrictive specs and so it’s easy to grab a sub-par model.

Hopefully, your search can end here since we’ve gathered five of our favorite laptops to use for web design and development.

Web design can require some labor-intensive software, like some of the programs in the Adobe suite, as well as UX systems and even asset creation.

We’ve assumed that you’re doing it all on your chosen laptop since that’ll have all of you covered, though be aware that the more functional machines will always be more expensive.

Check out our five laptops below and see what you think!

We’ve also included a buyers’ guide that you can use to both judge other laptops for yourself and understand how we ranked the laptops you’ll see on this page.

By learning from our buyers’ guide, you can apply the same standards to other laptops to find a quality product that should meet your web development needs.

In a Hurry?

If you’ve been contracted to build a site or otherwise want to get a move on, you can just take a look at our most recommended laptop and save your time.

You’re lucky too because the newest New Apple MacBook Pro is a laptop that needs no introduction.

We won’t stand on ceremony, we all know what Apple is, and that their MacBook line is full of capable workbooks.

Take a look at some of its details and see what you think.

• The latest MacBook Pro is capable of housing either a 9th Generation Intel Core i7 processor or a 9th Generation Intel Core i9 processor. Depending on which one you go for, you’ll also get either 512 or 1TB of in-built storage space and an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M or 5500M GPU.
• The MacBook shows visuals clearly with a 16” Retina display, and it also features Apple’s Touch ID system that only lets your fingerprint profile authenticate and unlock the laptop.
• The MacBook uses heat reduction and other life-expanding tricks to achieve an 11-hour battery life when coasting along. With intensive use, expect that figure to drop to 6 or 8 hours.

Best Laptops for Web Designing and Development

1. New Apple MacBook Pro

This may be one of the more predictable recommendations that could have reached the top of our list, but the latest Apple MacBook Pro has a focus on processing power and user accessibility that’s ideal for web designers.

As a web designer, you want a laptop that can do the heavy lifting of running and modifying your site development programs and its plug-ins while still being intuitive to use.

The MacBook series was one of the pioneers of the slim, processor performance-oriented style of laptop that dominate the portable market nowadays. By buying the latest, you can get some of the best processing available.

There are two choices with the laptop we’ve provided, the 9th Generation 6-Core Intel Core i7 processor or a 9th Generation 8-Core Intel Core i9 processor.

These choices are tethered to storage capacity too, with the weaker processor coming with a 512GB SSD and the stronger processor having 1TB of SSD storage to play with.

Between the processor and your storage, you have one of the most competent notebooks out right now. That also means that it’ll be more expensive, unfortunately.

If money is no object, however, you can purchase an SSD upgrade kit that’ll take your MacBook’s storage up to an impressive 8TB. You also have 16GB of RAM, which is more than enough for the overwhelming majority of computer users.

The GPU isn’t anything to write home about, but it should be more than enough to run the aesthetic aspects of site design as well as some asset creation for the sites you’re working on.

It uses an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M to 5500M GPU, depending on what MacBook type you get, with some extra work being done by a native Intel UHD Graphics 630 component.

As for the user interface features of this MacBook, it has one of those new 16” Retina displays that, along with being on the larger end of current notebook screens, reports its visuals in stunning and vivid color.

The keyboard is typical for a MacBook, their Magic Keyboard that’s super responsive.

They’ve gone for a Touch Bar over a touchpad, perfect for wide movements and expansive shortcuts, and this typing interface is topped with their Touch ID system that works off of fingerprint authentication.

With all of this running, it boasts a battery of approximately ten to eleven hours. Like with all slim laptops, this battery will deplete faster with more use, so you can reasonably expect around six to eight hours depending on how hard you’re working the computer.

2. Dell XPS 9570

This second laptop can give you similar performance to the MacBook at number one, so we’d advise giving it a look if you’re skeptical of Apple and their products.

That’d be the Dell XPS 9570, a fairly plain-looking silver aluminum machine that wouldn’t turn many heads in a computer store the same way that Apple products do.

Packed within that aluminum case, however, is a machine that can almost go toe to toe with the MacBook where development specs are concerned.

It has an 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8750H processor that should carry any web design or development programs that need to be run when constructing or modifying a website.

It sags a little with the GPU, sporting an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, but that’s still a powerful GPU in its own right if you’re using it to run the relevant development systems.

There’s 16GB of RAM, too, but you probably already guessed that. You also get a 512GB SSD, which will serve you well for a time and you can always use an external storage device if you need more storage in the future.

Digital items like the ones found in the Adobe suite can get quite hefty, but 512 should do you just fine if you’re smart about allocating data.

It has a 15.6” InfinityEdge display that’s virtually borderless, maximizing screen space so that you can blow up the sites you’re working on and see how they’d look in the wild.

That display is beveled too, so the slimness of this model doesn’t suffer for having as large a display. It’s also anti-glare, perfect for if you like working outdoors or in brightly lit spaces.

It’s slightly heavier than the MacBook at around four pounds, but we’d say this is offset by the many connection ports built into the XPS that Apple products are notoriously lacking.

These ports can be handy for transferring traditional information as well as web design or codes from your site projects. The laptop can last around nine hours uninterrupted, though this will likely fall to six, seven, or eight depending on your level of use.

3. Acer Aspire 7

Our next laptop is the Acer Aspire 7, a model from the gaming-oriented Aspire series that Acer offers.

The Aspire line also delivers comparatively affordable gaming options to the market, so they’re handy if you want some GPU power for a lower price tag.

Like many gaming laptops, the Aspire 7 has the credentials to perform some impressive workhorse tasks when it comes to digital development and web design.

So, what’s in this machine? Its CPU is an Intel Core i7-8750H, one of Intel’s 8th Generation 6-core processors that you can also find in the Dell XPS we talked about above.

It also has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, which should be able to play many of the most popular games from the last decade. If the machine can do that, it’ll have no problem displaying the graphics and other visual elements that you work with when making a site look pretty.

In terms of storage, the Aspire has a 128GB SSD that’s accompanied by a 1TB HDD. The intention here is to keep the HDD for the majority of your information storage but store videogames and other executables onto the SSD, so you can load them quickly.

Of course, you can apply this strategy to your web design so that the relevant development programs are stored onto your SSD while the denser information is kept on the HDD. It has 8GB of RAM, too, less than the previous two laptops but enough for many people.

The Aspire 7 has a 15.6” screen just like the XPS. The elephant in the room is that the Aspire series, the Aspire 7 included, tend to look older in terms of design.

This means that the screen has heavy borders as opposed to the virtually borderless screens that many notebooks have, and the laptop is heavier as a result. The Aspire 7’s battery lasts for only around six hours, with a two-hour charging period.

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4. ASUS ZenBook 13

Next up is our option for those on a budget, the ASUS ZenBook 13.

The ZenBook line is ASUS’s response to the work-oriented notebooks that have become popular in recent years, and the ZenBook 13 is one of the later variants with some of the better specs currently available.

The CPU of the ZenBook 13 will take two forms depending on which version you buy. The weaker ZenBook 13 CPU is still enough for the job with an 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8565U processor, and the stronger one is a 10th Generation Intel Quad-Core i7-10510U processor.

Your choice of processor also determines the GPU your machine has, but the graphics aren’t that impressive and won’t be a big consideration when buying. You’ll either get the native Intel UHD Graphics or an integrated GeForce MX250 graphics card.

No matter which version you pick, you’ll get a 512GB NVMe SSD that’s accompanied by 16GB of RAM.

This should be more than enough for what you need but, if you require more space, you can easily use the money saved with this option to buy some external storage that you can use to keep the SSD agile.

The laptop has an ultra-slim bezel 13.3” NanoEdge display, achieving a 95% screen-to-body ratio that ensures no space is wasted.

The entire laptop is lightweight at 2.6 pounds while being constructed from military standard metal, so it shouldn’t dent or break easily.

Into the case is built their ErgoLift typing interface that keeps your hands comfortable when typing for prolonged periods.

The touchpad is also capable of becoming a NumberPad with just one tap, perfect for the quick data entry that you’ll need to do when tinkering with websites.

5. Lenovo Yoga 730

The final laptop model we have to show you is the Lenovo Yoga 730.

Lenovo’s Yoga line is their own foray into modern notebook machines, with their own twist built into the construction. It’s pretty similar to the ZenBook 12, so if you’re shopping at this end of our list then your choice will be a tossup of the two.

The processor of this model is the weakest out of all the laptops on this list, which is the main reason it’s down here. It’s an Intel Core i5-8250U, nothing to spit at by any means, but weak in comparison to the i7 and i9 CPUs that many notebooks sport nowadays.

It has humble graphics too, using a native Intel UHD Graphics 620 card, so this laptop would best be used by site developers who don’t plan on working with asset creation that much.

The storage capacity of the Lenovo Yoga 730 is only 256GB too. It’s below what we’d think is ideal, which is 512GB to 1TB, but with the use of an external storage device and some wary data allocation, it’s possible to get the most out of this limited SSD.

It has 8GB of RAM too, which should be enough for most activities as long as you’re not running too much at once.

It has the standard 15.6” size display, but it’s also a touchscreen. The display is also where the main gimmick of the Yoga line comes into play, as you can fold and flip this laptop to use it as a tablet.

This and the touchscreen provide unparalleled immediacy to the operation of this laptop, perfect for when you need to add touches that aren’t possible through a relatively clumsy touchpad or mouse.

Laptop for Web Designing and Development Buyer’s Guide

Picking the Best Web Development Laptop

If you’re committed to looking for the best, you’ll need to rule some products out.

If you’re trained in web design and development, we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you know the basics, but others may need a refresher on what to look out for when choosing the best laptop.

It’s easy to be objective when comparing technology because of their specs, so we’re in luck.

This buyers’ guide should give you some ideas of what to look for in a quality laptop.

Even if you don’t end up choosing any of the laptops in our list, you can apply these standards to other laptops to see if they’re worth getting.

We’ve divided the ideal laptop into its different subheadings and described what you should look for with each spec.

CPU Power

Your processor, or CPU, will be doing most of the heavy lifting.

Most of the modern notebooks available on the market often have the CPU as the most powerful component since they’re targeting busy and on-the-go individuals who need a compact but capable machine that they can work from.

This includes running programs for digital design, particularly the Adobe suite and other site-management software.

So, what do we suggest? It depends on just how much you’re doing, but as the hardware expectations of new technology are shifting, you’re safe getting i7 and i9 CPUs for now.

That isn’t to say you can’t slum it with an i5 if you’re mostly modifying sites or only running one program at a time.

GPU Power

Many people think of video gaming when looking at GPUs, but they do have some use in the day-to-day operation of your computer.

If you’re planning on working with graphics (as in, the artsy image/animation kind) then you’ll want more graphical power on your computer.

This is especially the case if you’re planning on creating your own assets for the site.

You’ll need to decide for yourself how much graphics power you want.

You can see on our list that we have a mix of GPUs, from native Intel UHD graphics cards to GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, or AMD Radeon Pro 5300M to 5500M.

We’d obviously advise that you get the best you can while taking into account the price and how intensive your use of the laptop will be.

Storage Capacity

We’re assuming you’ll want to store most of your work software onto an SSD to shorten the loading process. Fortunately, most notebooks lean on SSDs over HDDs, and so the SSDs on offer can get as steep as one whole terabyte of storage.

We’d suggest you get a notebook with 512GB to 1TB of storage capacity, so you have plenty to work with. You could probably get away with less if you have an in-built HDD too or an external storage device.

That said, remember that SSDs deteriorate when too much is put on them, making them slower, so you should purge or move data from your SSD when it starts to fill up.

Display

If you want to see how your site will look on the page, you should have a good display so that you can see what you’re doing.

The latest innovations in notebook design are to have a virtually borderless screen, resulting in a very large and vivid display, so you’re in luck if visuals are a high priority when buying.

For more information on what specs are needed for web development, watch this video:

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