Why Most Templates Look the Same These Days
The small defaults that make a website feel generic, and how to avoid them.
By Maya Aydin
In this article
Defaults are decisions someone else made
Where sameness creeps in
What makes a page feel specific
Templates can be specific too
Open ten website templates and you'll notice something odd: they were made by different people, in different countries, for different industries, and they still feel like the same website wearing different clothes.
It isn't laziness. It's that every tool ships with defaults, and defaults are easy to accept. A centred hero, three feature cards, a testimonial slider, a dark footer. Each piece is fine on its own. Together, they're wallpaper.
Defaults are decisions someone else made
A default is a decision made by a tool's designer for an average case that doesn't exist. Your project isn't average. The moment you accept a default without asking what it's for, you've handed a small part of the design to someone who has never met your client.
The fastest way to break out is to ask one question of every element on the page: what job is this doing? If the answer is "it fills space" or "every site has one", it can go.
Generic isn't a style. It's the absence of decisions.
Where sameness creeps in
In my experience it's almost always the same handful of places:
The grid. Everything centred, everything equal width. Nothing leads the eye.
Type scale. Headings that are only slightly bigger than the body text, so nothing feels important.
Spacing. The same gap between every section, which flattens the rhythm of the page.
Imagery. Stock photos chosen for the shape of the space rather than what they say.
Motion. The same fade-up on every element, applied because it's available.
A quick test
Blur the page until you can't read it. If it still looks like the brand, the structure is doing work. If it could be any company, the structure is borrowed.
What makes a page feel specific
Specificity usually comes from a small number of brave choices, not a hundred small ones. One oversized element. One colour used with conviction. One layout rule that repeats and becomes recognisable.
On a recent basketball brand, the entire identity came down to a single red and a wordmark cut at speed. Nothing else needed to shout, because one thing already did.
Templates can be specific too
None of this is an argument against templates. I build them. A good template gives you a strong point of view and a system that survives being customised. A weak one gives you a shell that looks the same no matter who fills it.
The difference isn't the format. It's whether anybody made real decisions before the file was exported.
