Why Ugly Websites Win: The Case for Brutal Minimalism in 2026

The Design Paradox Nobody Talks About

Here’s something that should bother every designer who’s ever agonized over a hero section: Drudge Report and Craigslist are two of the most successful websites ever built.

No hero images. No parallax scrolling. No carefully curated color palettes. Just text, links, and ruthless utility.

We’ve spent twenty years pretending this is an anomaly. A quirk. Something that worked “back then” but couldn’t possibly work now.

We were wrong. And January 2026 just proved it.

What Changed This Month

In the span of a single week, I built two complete websites with hundreds of pages with nearly perfect SEO scores and great content, and published 31 full designed articles with 1400 illustrations using Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. If you are not onboard yet, you have been warned. But Claude Code isn’t what this article is about, but is about indirectly.

The two sites are not rough drafts. Not wireframes. Fully functional, deployed, live websites, that are already starting to rank long tail keywords in their niches:

• TheBonCast.com
• WannaGoSee.com

Both sites share something in common: they’re brutally simple.

No fancy frameworks. No elaborate animations. No design flourishes competing for attention. Just clean HTML, fast load times, and content that serves a purpose.

And here’s the thing: they score nearly perfect on every crawl tool I’ve thrown at them. They are Google SERPs catnip.

The Numbers That Actually Matter

Let’s talk about what performance tools actually measure, because this is where the “ugly design wins” argument, especially right now, is back with a meaner vengeance than anyone could have imagined over Christmas break.

Core Web Vitals

Google doesn’t care about your gradient mesh backgrounds. It cares about:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How fast does the main content load?
• First Input Delay (FID): How quickly can users interact?
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Does the page jump around while loading?

Every decorative element you add is a hit to these metrics. Every JavaScript animation is render-blocking code. Every custom font is another HTTP request. Superfluous design is revenue threatening, to put it plainly, from this moment forward (the Claude Code moment).

Drudge Report? Loads in under a second. Craigslist? Same story.

Lighthouse Scores

When I ran Unlighthouse across both new sites, the results were almost boring:

• Performance: 95-100
• Accessibility: 95-100
• Best Practices: 100
• SEO: 100

Try getting those numbers with a WordPress theme loaded with sliders, carousels, and parallax effects.

Jakob Nielsen Told Us This Decades Ago

I’m not saying anything new here. Jakob Nielsen, godfather of web usability, has been preaching this gospel since the 1990s.

His research consistently showed that users don’t visit websites to admire the design. They want to accomplish tasks. Every design element that doesn’t serve that task is friction. In a sense, like it or not, 99.5% of web design is noise.

Nielsen’s heuristics boil down to something uncomfortable for designers: the best interface is the one you don’t notice.

Drudge Report, Craigslist, and other stripped down sites, aren’t successful despite their “ugly” design. They’re successful because their design is invisible. Nothing stands between the user and the content. There is no friction. Isn’t that best kind of design? What does “brand” matter if it’s in the way?

The llms.txt Revolution

Here’s where things get interesting for 2026.

There’s a growing movement around something called llms.txt, the proposed standard for making websites discoverable by AI language models. Think of it like robots.txt, but for AI assistants.

The premise is simple: as more people use AI to find information, your website needs to be parseable not just by Google’s crawler, but by Claude, ChatGPT, and whatever comes next.

What kind of websites are easiest for AI to parse?

• Clean semantic HTML
• Minimal JavaScript
• Clear content hierarchy
• Fast load times
• Structured data

In other words: exactly the kind of brutally simple sites that look “ugly” by contemporary design standards. Self-concerned design only pollutes the scoring that AI does to a site.

Both TheBonCast.com and WannaGoSee.com were built with this in mind. Not because I predicted the llms.txt movement, but because simplicity serves multiple masters simultaneously. And, well, 2026 is going to be wild to say the least. Everything has changed with tools like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Cursor, etc.

Almost everything we know and practice about web design is going to be upended this year.

The AI Acceleration Effect

Let’s connect some dots.

When building a website took weeks or months, elaborate design made a kind of sense. If you’re investing that much time, you want something that looks “impressive.” Something that justifies the investment.

The ridiculous built-in inefficiencies of marketing and sales cycles in the traditional way of building and branding web sites, all of that has effectively been swept away. Enterprises, organizations, agencies, and everything downstream of that is going through the largest imaginable reordering and flattening. Layers of people, layers of design, layers of friction are all going away faster than you can imagine.

But what happens when you can build a complete website in a day? A site that ranks nearly perfectly in all the things that search engines and LLM agents are looking for?

The calculus changes completely.

It’s not possible to overstate this.

Using Claude Code, I can spin up a site, test it, measure its performance, and iterate faster than most agencies can schedule a kickoff meeting. That speed advantage only exists if I’m not fighting with complex CSS frameworks and JavaScript libraries.

All that matters right now is your own personal agency. Not the kind that you own. I mean your own personal agency to act when you know it’s time to act.

Simplicity isn’t just an aesthetic choice anymore. It’s a competitive advantage.

Right now is the time for simplicity and agency. Which brings us back to our main point about one small piece of the puzzle.

Real Examples of Ugly Winning

Let me refresh your memory with some concrete examples beyond Drudge and Craigslist:

Hacker News

Y Combinator’s news site looks like it was designed in 1998. Orange header, plain text, no images. It’s one of the most influential tech communities on the internet.

Pinboard

A bookmarking service that explicitly markets itself as having “no social features, no recommendations, no bulk editing.” The design is aggressively plain. It’s been running profitably for over a decade.

Berkshire Hathaway

Warren Buffett’s company website looks like a Word document. It’s a Fortune 500 company. They could afford any design they want. They chose this.

Wikipedia

Arguably the most important reference website ever created. The design hasn’t fundamentally changed in twenty years. It works.

What This Means for Designers

I’ve spent my whole career thinking about typography, visual hierarchy, and the craft of design. So let me be clear: I’m not saying design doesn’t matter. I was tracing fonts out of typography books in the eighth grade: I love design, I love typography, I love the web. None of that is going to change.

But what I’m saying is that we’ve confused “design” with “decoration” forever, and now that house of cards isn’t just falling, it has already fallen and is largely irrelevant as of right now, thanks to AI in 2026. January was truly a watershed moment.

Good design makes content accessible, readable, and useful. That’s it. Everything else is decoration, and decoration has costs that we’ve been ignoring, but are now fully exposed due to AI:

• Slower load times
• Higher bounce rates
• Worse SEO performance
• More maintenance overhead
• Increased development costs
• Harder AI discoverability

The designers who thrive in this new environment will be the ones who understand that restraint is now a strategy and a survival mechanism for the entire profession. We all have to design “AI first”. Starting now.

The Performance-First Design Framework

If you’re building a website in 2026, here’s a framework that actually works:

1. Start With Content

What does the user need to accomplish? What information do they need? Design around that—nothing more.

2. Choose Speed Over Spectacle

Every visual element should earn its place by improving usability. If it doesn’t help the user, cut it.

3. Test With Real Tools

Run Lighthouse. Run webhint. Check your Core Web Vitals. Let the numbers guide your decisions, not your aesthetic preferences.

4. Design for Multiple Consumers

Your website has human visitors, but also Google’s crawler, AI assistants, screen readers, and low-bandwidth connections. Simple design serves all of them.

5. Ship and Iterate

With AI-assisted development, you can build fast enough to test real user behavior instead of guessing. Launch simple, measure results, add complexity only where data justifies it. On the other hand, you have no choice but to get in the AI-assisted development game right now.

Typography for Minimalist Sites

If you’re embracing minimalism, typography becomes one of your few design choices. Make it count.

The Zero-KB Option: System Fonts

The fastest typography is no external typography at all. System font stacks give you instant rendering with zero network requests:

font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, sans-serif;

This gives you San Francisco on Apple devices, Segoe UI on Windows, and Roboto on Android. Users don’t notice—which is the point.

When You Need a Web Font

If brand requires custom typography, choose fonts optimized for performance and screen readability:

Sans-serif options: Inter (variable font, tiny file size), Roboto (familiar to billions), or Source Sans Pro (excellent language support).

Serif options: Lora (beautiful italics), Merriweather (optimized for screens), or Playfair Display (editorial headlines).

Monospace options: Inconsolata remains the gold standard for utilitarian interfaces—clean, readable, and well-kerned.

Limit yourself to two weights maximum. Self-host. Use font-display: swap. Every kilobyte you save is a millisecond earned.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s what I’ve learned from building sites with Claude Code this month:

The fastest way to build a high-performing website is to build a simple one.

Not because simple is easier (it’s actually harder—you have to make real choices about what matters). But because simple is faster to build, faster to load, faster to maintain, and faster to adapt when things change. For the vast majority of small business sites, frameworks and content management systems like WordPress have been rendered irrelevant.

The sites that win in 2026 won’t be the prettiest. They’ll be the fastest, most accessible, most useful ones, to people and AI agents and bots.

Drudge and Craigslist figured this out decades ago. The rest of us are finally catching up.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is minimalist design the same as lazy design?

No. Minimalist design requires harder decisions about what to include. Lazy design adds elements without purpose. True minimalism is intentional reduction to essentials.

Won’t my site look outdated with minimal design?

Drudge Report has looked “outdated” for 25 years and still gets massive traffic. Users care about utility, not trends. A fast, useful site never feels outdated.

How do I convince clients that simple design is better?

Show them the performance numbers. Lighthouse scores, Core Web Vitals, and load times are objective metrics. When their “beautiful” site scores 45 on performance and your simple version scores 98, the conversation changes.

What’s llms.txt and why should I care?

It’s a proposed standard for making websites discoverable by AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. As more users rely on AI for information, sites that are easily parsed by language models will have a discoverability advantage.

Can complex sites ever score well on performance?

Yes, with significant optimization effort. But you’re fighting against the complexity rather than working with simplicity. It’s possible but expensive.

Does this mean designers are obsolete?

No. It means the definition of “good design” is shifting from visual decoration to functional effectiveness. Designers who understand performance, accessibility, and user needs will be more valuable than ever.

Where This Is Going

I built TheBonCast.com and WannaGoSee.com as experiments in this philosophy. Both are intentionally simple—not because I couldn’t make them fancier, but because fancy wasn’t the point.

The point was: can you build something useful, fast, and optimized in a fraction of the time it used to take?

The answer is yes. And that changes everything about how we should think about web design.

The future isn’t pixel-perfect mockups and elaborate design systems. The future is speed, utility, and content that serves real human needs.

Drudge and Craigslist were right all along. It just took AI to help the rest of us see it.

More Font Resources

• Types of Fonts — Understanding font classifications
• Best Fonts for Designers — Curated recommendations by category
• Google Font Combinations — Proven pairings when you do need web fonts