why does every website i see suck?

opinions · Oct 5, 2026 · 4 min read

this is not a post about wordpress. i want to be clear about that before i start, because the version of this complaint that circulates in italian design twitter is always really a complaint about one tool, and the tool is not the problem.

the claim is roughly this: in italy everything is a cms, everything made with a cms looks the same, therefore italian web design is bad. i have heard it said about small businesses, about restaurants, about dentists, about lawyers. i have heard it said with a lot of enjoyment, which should already be a warning sign.

the honest version of the complaint

some of it is completely fair. if you open thirty sites for italian plumbers and twenty of them are the same template with a different photograph, you have learned something real about the market. that is not a taste problem, that is a supply problem: there is a template, there is a person who installs it for four hundred euros, and there is nobody between the two of you.

what is actually true:

• most small-business sites are template installations, not design work
• the template is chosen by whoever is cheapest to find, not by whoever understands the reader
• the result is a page that ranks, converts a little, and is forgotten
• a large amount of it is slow, and a large amount of it breaks on a phone

none of that requires wordpress to be true. it requires the buyer to not know what they are buying and the seller to not tell them.

the version that is wrong

the wrong version says the cms is to blame. the cms is a tool. wordpress is a tool that a great many people, including a lot of very good developers, use well.

the more useful claim is: the tool is chosen by the person with the least power in the transaction. the person paying for a site is not the person operating it. the operator wants something they can update without calling anyone. that is a completely rational want, and it is the want a cms is built to satisfy.

so the cms is the symptom. the cause is that the person paying and the person using the site are different people, and nobody in the middle is responsible for how it reads.

the part i actually object to

what makes me angry is not the template. it is that these sites are then sold as design.

a small business gets told it is getting a website. what arrives is a page with a hero image, three feature boxes with icons in them, a contact form that goes nowhere, and a claim that it is "modern". the price is serious money. the same shop could have had something readable, fast, and honest for a fraction of it, and did not know to ask.

that is not a taste disagreement. it is someone being paid for the appearance of the work rather than the work, and the buyer has no way to tell the difference because they have no reference for what good looks like.

i do not think the people operating these sites are stupid. most of them are doing their best with what they were given. i think the whole chain is arranged so that nobody is in a position to notice.

what i would actually change

if i could put one thing on every small business site in italy, it would not be a font or a colour. it would be the phone number, in text, visible without scrolling, at the top.

that single change would outperform most of the design work being sold. a person on a phone in a street who wants to call you does not need a hero section. they need to see whether you exist and whether you answer.

after that:

• make it load on a phone, on a bad connection, without waiting
• write the text in the voice of the person who runs the shop
• delete every icon that is not carrying information
• let the page be a page

the part where i am the problem

i build sites for a living, in the same country, in the same market. it would be very convenient for me if the answer were "the italians are bad at this".

it is not that simple. i have been handed bad briefs. i have quoted for work that should not have been quoted for. i have shipped things i was not proud of because the scope was a template plus a logo and nobody had asked for more.

the market that produces the four-hundred-euro plumber site also produces the person who thinks a site is a thing you buy once. i am inside that market. so is everyone who ships here.

if the whole local web is bad, that includes the part of it that is mine.

what i take from it

• the tool is rarely the problem. the person choosing it is
• template installs are not design and should not be sold as design. the buyer deserves to know which one they are getting
• the fastest site on a bad connection wins, and that is a technical decision made once, not a visual one
• the phone number at the top beats every hero section i have ever been paid to design
• i am part of the market i am complaining about, which is the part that makes it awkward to post

i still think most of it is bad. i just do not think "bad" is a nationality here.