Design ought to be the frontier of uniqueness - the place where a business gets to leave a footprint that's recognisably its own. And yet, as the web has matured, something odd has happened. Websites are starting to look the same.
SaaS sites are the clearest example, and once you see it you can't unsee it. Centre-aligned hero. Headline, sub-headline, call to action. A row of well-known client logos. An explanatory video. Alternating image-and-text blocks. A statistics band. A CTA banner sitting just above a footer laid out much like every other footer. Line three of them up and the layouts rhyme.
So what happened?
Performance ate aesthetics
Websites are commercially load-bearing now. They generate leads, sales, memberships. Which quite reasonably led to a focus on optimising performance - conversion rate optimisation, analytics, testing whether a design actually works rather than whether anyone likes it.
That's progress. But it produced a side effect. "Best practice" became the safe harbour, and safety is the enemy of distinctiveness. Follow every established pattern and you'll get a usable, performant, entirely forgettable website.
The pressure to build quickly compounds it. Frameworks - HTML, CSS, JavaScript - accelerate delivery, and they also nudge everyone towards the same shapes. That effect is strongest on less experienced designers, who understandably reach for the pattern that's known to work rather than the one they'd have to defend.
Follow every established pattern and you'll get a usable, performant, entirely forgettable website. Safety is the enemy of distinctiveness.
Is this actually a crisis?
Honestly - not entirely, and I want to be fair to the other side.
From a business standpoint, prioritising usability and simplicity is sensible. Familiar patterns work because people already know how to use them. A user who doesn't have to learn your interface converts better than one who does. Novelty for its own sake is a tax on the visitor, and they didn't ask to pay it.
From an artistic standpoint, though, it's dispiriting. A predictable landscape stifles the originality that made web design interesting in the first place. And commercially, there's a real cost that the CRO dashboard won't show you: if you look identical to your competitors, you have handed the customer nothing to remember you by. You've optimised the conversion and lost the brand.
Both things are true at once, which is why this is genuinely difficult rather than merely annoying.
Creativity isn't the same as decoration
Here's the reframe I'd offer. When designers argue for creativity, business people often hear "I want to make it prettier", and reasonably decline.
But creativity in this context isn't aesthetics. It's inventiveness about how people interact with your product - the structure of the journey, the way information is revealed, the moment that surprises someone into paying attention. That kind of creativity improves conversion; it doesn't compete with it.
Follow the essential principles, certainly. But your users are not the same as everyone else's users, and their needs will differ from site to site. Treating best practice as a template rather than a foundation is where the homogeneity comes from.
The seat at the table
Which brings us to the harder issue. Very few designers reach the C-suite. Design departments frequently sit under Product, Engineering or Marketing, without a defined remit of their own - and so design gets consulted after the decisions are made, which is precisely when it can no longer influence anything that matters.
I'd argue the commoditisation of design and the absence of design leadership are the same problem viewed from different ends. If design is a service function, it will produce service-function work: safe, competent, indistinguishable. If it's a strategic function, it gets to ask why the product is shaped this way at all.
So the question for a leadership team. When was design last in the room for a decision before the brief was written? If the honest answer is never, then the sameness of your website isn't a failure of your designers' imagination. It's a description of the job you gave them.
Worth a conversation? Book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction - no pitch, just an honest look at whether your digital experience is distinctive or merely competent.
