Why Every Website Now Looks Like Every Other Website

Large hero image, three columns of icons, a wall of logos, a final panel repeating the first one. Sites in entirely unrelated industries have converged on an identical arrangement.

Almost nobody starts from a blank page

Modern sites are assembled from component libraries and design systems that arrive with buttons, cards, grids and spacing already decided by somebody else, somewhere else.

Those defaults are good, which is the problem. A team that accepts them ships faster and breaks less, and produces something visually indistinguishable from every other team doing the same.

Departing from the defaults costs design time, review time and maintenance forever afterwards. The economics point one way and nearly every project follows them.

Testing converges on the same local maximum

Sites that measure conversion run continuous comparisons between small variations, keeping whichever performs better and quietly discarding the other.

Small steps in the direction of improvement reliably lead to the nearest peak, and since everyone is climbing a similar hill with similar visitors, they arrive at similar summits.

Genuinely different layouts test badly at first, because visitors have to learn them. A process that judges by next week's numbers will never keep one long enough to find out.

Small screens removed most of the choices

A phone screen is a single narrow column. Anything elaborate has to collapse into a stack of blocks, and that stack is the layout most visitors actually see.

Designing for it first means designing the stack first, then letting it spread out on wider screens. The wide version becomes a decoration of the narrow one.

Asymmetric multi-column layouts of the kind print design produced simply have nowhere to go on a phone, so they gradually stopped being drawn at all.

Shared conventions are worth more than novelty

Visitors arrive already knowing that the logo returns them home, that the menu hides behind three horizontal lines, and that account controls live in the top right corner.

Those expectations were expensive to build across an entire population, and a site that violates them pays for the re-education itself, in confusion and abandoned visits.

Sameness is therefore partly a service to the reader. It is also a decision nobody ever has to defend in a meeting, which helps it enormously.

Distinctiveness retreated to colour and type

The levers that remain cheap are typeface, palette, photography and copy, so brands do almost all of their differentiating there while sitting on identical structural bones.

This is why two sites can feel entirely different for about four seconds, then reveal precisely the same sequence of sections as you scroll down them.

The look is not laziness so much as the visible residue of a thousand small decisions, each individually sensible, all of them pointing at the same page.