The 2011 Intercontinental Championship redesign and WWE’s 2013 WWE Championship are the strongest redesigns in the available evidence; the 2016 red Universal Championship is the clearest miss. This is a WWE-focused, editorial assessment—not an industry-wide consensus ranking. The documented examples do not support a reliable five-best and five-worst list without inventing entries, so this feature evaluates the designs that can be identified and assessed on the record.
How to judge a championship redesign
A belt has to do more than display a logo. For this assessment, the useful questions are whether it signals its title and promotion at a glance, has a distinctive visual identity, respects the title’s history, and uses customization to add meaning rather than distract from the championship itself. Those are editorial criteria, not an official WWE standard.
WWE’s own history helps establish the lineage behind some of these choices, but it does not rank fan approval. Criticism below is attributed to individual writers where the available accounts identify one; it should not be mistaken for a measured consensus.
The strongest redesigns
1. The 2011 Intercontinental Championship return
A 2019 WrestleTalk retrospective praised the 2011 Intercontinental redesign. A 2016 Bleacher Report critic separately singled out the Intercontinental belt’s blue globe and white strap as a successful look. Those are two writers’ favorable assessments, not survey results, but they point to a clear strength: a recognizable motif and color identity can make a title feel like its own championship rather than a branded prop.
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#1 Best Overall
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2. The 2013 WWE Championship
The 2013 design replaced the spinner-era WWE Championship and introduced customizable side plates, initially tailored for The Rock and then John Cena, according to WWE’s title history. That gave the belt a stable central identity while letting individual champions leave a mark on it—a useful balance between continuity and personalization.
WWE’s 2013 making-of feature reported that the redesign took 540 days, cost more than $50,000, and used 228 gems on its plates. WWE also described a custom aluminum logo plate made through 3D printing and a leather strap. These are the company’s production figures, not independently audited measurements of cost or labor. In a 2019 Bleacher Report article, one writer argued that customizable plates made the WWE Championship more adaptable and influenced later WWE belt designs; that is the writer’s interpretation of its influence.
Rank #2
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3. The 2017 NXT title redesigns
WrestleTalk’s 2019 retrospective praised the 2017 NXT redesigns. The available account supports treating them as a successful design direction, but does not provide enough specific visual description to compare individual belts or explain which details drove that praise. The case for including them is therefore narrower than for the first two picks: it rests on an identified retrospective judgment, not a detailed or independently measured evaluation.
The clearest redesign miss
The 2016 red Universal Championship
A 2016 Bleacher Report critic objected to the red Universal Championship’s visual execution. That criticism is subjective, but it illustrates a real design risk: applying a conspicuous brand color does not automatically create a distinctive or convincing championship identity. The source supports calling this one critic’s negative assessment, not claiming that fans universally disliked the belt.
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Rank #3
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Why this is not a five-best, five-worst list
The evidence identifies several WWE designs from the 2010s, but it does not establish ten distinct redesign candidates or a ranked comparison across them. A 2019 WrestleTalk retrospective also criticized some tag-title changes, but the available account does not name the designs or explain the basis for its criticism. Turning that reference into specific bottom-five entries would require details not established here.
That limitation matters because a top-and-bottom list can look authoritative even when it is only one writer’s taste. The examples above make a defensible, narrower comparison: the Intercontinental redesign and WWE Championship have identifiable strengths in the cited commentary and official history; the Universal belt has a documented critical response; and the NXT redesigns received favorable retrospective notice. Nothing here establishes sales, popularity rankings, or broad fan approval.
Historical context: the designs these changes followed
WWE’s title history describes multiple earlier WWE Championship designs, including a 1983 green-leather belt with gold plates, a wrestler-and-globe motif, and previous champions’ names on the side plates. WWE calls the 1988 Winged Eagle variation “arguably” its most popular and says it represented the championship for nearly a decade. That popularity description belongs to WWE; it is not a measured ranking. These earlier designs offer context for how strongly a belt can express title identity, but they are outside the 2010s and are not counted as redesign picks here.
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