Every website looks the same now, and it happened so gradually nobody made a decision
Open ten random SaaS landing pages and you could swap the layouts without anyone noticing: hero with headline and subheadline, CTA button, three-card feature grid, testimonial carousel, pricing table, footer. Ten years ago this was a template problem — now it's the original sites too, because the templates won.
The convergence isn't laziness. It's a rational response to measured outcomes. A/B testing found the same layouts, the same button colors, the same above-the-fold patterns. Design systems like Tailwind and Material made divergence more work than conformity. And once users trained on the pattern, anything unfamiliar felt broken, which validated the metrics. So the loop tightened: test, same answer, ship, users learn it, test, same answer.
What got lost is harder to name than what got gained. Usability went up. Onboarding friction dropped. But the web stopped being a place you could tell apart by looking — the visual identity that used to say "you're somewhere specific" flattened into a signal that just says "this is a website." A Craigslist or a Hacker News now reads as deliberately anachronistic rather than normal.
The part worth sitting with: the convergence isn't wrong on any individual dimension. Every site that adopted the pattern improved its own numbers. It's only off at the level of the whole — if "the web" is supposed to be a space of distinct places and it quietly became one place with different logos. Is the variety worth paying for, or was it always an accident of the tools being hard?
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