One landing-page template, eight sites, eight years

Eight sites over the following years all shipped the same stack: Bootstrap plus supersized for the full-screen background slideshow, bigvideo, kenburns for the slow zoom, and Font Awesome. They differ in copy and images and almost nowhere else.

That was a strategy rather than an accident. A landing page for an idea you are testing is a content problem, not an engineering one, and a known-good template turns a week into an afternoon. Several of these existed to find out whether anyone cared and most of the answers were no. Building each properly would have been a worse use of the time.

The cost accumulates invisibly per site: roughly 128KB of unminified vendor JavaScript per copy, the same web fonts in four formats across eight repositories, and a background slideshow dominating load on every page. None of it mattered per site and all of it was carried forward unexamined.

The template stops being the fast path when a site outlives the test it was built for, and two of these ran for years.

The last one, in 2025, is the same template eight years on.