The template effect. Why so many business websites look the same

Search Google for your trade and your town, then open a few company websites from the results. At the top there is a big photo of smiling people, with a headline and two buttons over it. Below that, a row of tiles with icons, then “About us” and a contact form. The next site is the same. Only the logo and the button colour change. That is what a template website usually looks like.

We call this the template effect. Sites of different firms look and sound the same because they were built from the same ready-made designs. A template is not a bad thing in itself, but it has consequences you don't see straight away.

Where template websites come from

A website template is a finished design. You drop in your own logo, text and photos. It is made once and sold many times. The same template can sit behind a dentist's site in one country and an accounting office in another.

People usually choose a template by its demo version. Everything there looks good, because the photos and text were picked for an invented company. Once your own content goes in, the layout stays, and much of what you liked about it is gone.

Site builders with ready-made blocks work in a similar way. You pick sections from a list and stack them one under another. Everyone gets the same blocks, so the sites come out similar too.

Sometimes an agency builds sites on a production line. It has a few proven layouts and pastes each new client's content into them. For the agency that is quick and convenient. The client often doesn't know their site has twins.

Now AI does the same. We asked it for a website for six different firms with the same short request. The dentist and the car workshop got almost the same headline. We wrote about that test separately.

How to recognise a website template

These are the signs that give a template away most easily.

• The same stock photos. A handshake, or a smiling person wearing a headset. You see the same faces on the sites of completely different businesses. A search by image in Google shows this quickly.
• The same sections in the same order. A big banner, services in tiles, “Why us”, reviews, contact. The order comes from the template, not from what the customer is looking for.
• Text that fits any company. “We are a team of passionate professionals” works just as well for a bakery as for a law firm. If a sentence can move to a competitor's site without changing a word, it says nothing about you.
• Three icons in a row. Quality, experience, trust. They fit any company, so they describe none.
• A first screen with a big headline and two buttons. A general slogan with “Contact us” and “Learn more” under it. People in the trade call this screen the hero.

One of these signs on its own proves nothing. Two buttons on the first screen are often a sensible idea. The trouble starts when all of them are there at once and nothing on the page is yours.

What the template effect costs a business

People don't remember you. Someone looks through a few hairdressers' sites in the evening. In the morning they remember that one had nice photos, but not which one.

People confuse you with competitors. If your site looks like the site of the salon on the next street, a customer may call them while thinking they are calling you.

Generic text gives no reason to pick you. Every company promises professional service and an individual approach. A customer is looking for one concrete reason. If the site doesn't give it, what's left is price, distance, or whoever picked up the phone first.

Then there is Google. A template on its own is not a problem for the search engine. But copied text that sits on many sites gives Google nothing to show your particular firm for. A description of your real services and of what you do differently at least gives it something that belongs only to you.

When a template is all you need

Templates have their place, and there is no point pretending otherwise. If you are testing a new idea and don't know yet whether the business will take off, a ready-made site put up quickly is a sensible choice. If the idea doesn't work out, you lose little.

The same goes for a very simple need. If the site only has to show your address and phone number, building it from scratch is overkill.

What matters is choosing with your eyes open. A ready-made platform and a custom solution spread their costs over time in different ways. For an online store you can work this out with the platform vs custom store calculator. You enter every number yourself.

Open your site and read the first screen as if a competitor's logo stood where yours is. If the text would still fit, start your changes there and leave the look for later. You can check the technical side of your site for free with our website scan.