One of the most dangerous mistakes I see people make with their websites is fixating on what the competition is doing.

Don't get me wrong. Competitive analysis is a valuable part of any digital strategy, but there's a fine line between being aware of the competition's strengths and weaknesses and letting them dictate your own direction.

The slow slide into copying

That's the danger here. Very quickly you can go from a healthy interest in your competition to essentially copying them every step. And if you fall into that trap, the inevitable result is that you're always going to be one step behind them.

Not that anybody ever sets out to copy their competition, but it's insidious and it can happen without you even noticing. It starts out with a competitive review and then quickly moves to "Well, none of our competitors do that," or "Everybody has this kind of information architecture, so we should too," and before you know it, you've created a clone of your competitors.

It's not only about being one step behind

But this isn't just the worry of being one step behind your competition. There are two other considerations here as well.

First, you quickly find that in some sectors all the companies end up looking the same, as they all copy one another, and so your site does nothing to stand out from the crowd, making it largely redundant.

Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly, there's a false premise behind the desire to copy the competition. That's the belief that your competitors somehow know how to do things properly and that we should learn from them. There's an assumption that they've done their research, that they've made good decisions, which in my experience is simply not true.

But they're bigger than us, surely they know what they're doing?

Now I know what you might be thinking. "Our competition is much bigger than us. They've got more resources and more time, so surely they're making good decisions based on real data, and we can learn from that." However, that's rarely the case. I've worked with many large enterprise organizations, and to be frank they're just as disorganized, inefficient and over-stretched as their much smaller competitors.

You are not your competitors

And then, of course, there's the fact that you are not your competitors. Although you may be very similar, every organization is unique and needs to approach the market in a different way. If your competitors really are bigger than you, then you're not going to have the same success adopting their tactics.

The real reason we copy

However, in many ways, all of this is a distraction from the real reason that most people want to copy their competition. That's the fact that you don't get in trouble for doing what your competitors have done. They give you a point of reference that you can point at and say, "Well, they did this and it obviously worked for them." Of course, the chances are that's not actually true, and the very feature you're copying could well be underperforming for your competitors. Nevertheless, you have a justification for your actions.

Do your own research instead

But copying the competition is not the only justification you can use. Far better is to carry out your own research into user needs and behavior and base your decisions on that. Even if that research is just desk research, carried out online using the help of AI deep research tools like Perplexity.

And if you really need to see a particular approach working in the real world, then I'd encourage you to look outside of your sector, where there are ample opportunities for you to find ideas that could be truly innovative in your own.

So the next time you find yourself tempted to reject an idea because a competitor hasn't adopted that approach, or to implement a feature you've seen on a competitor's website, I'd encourage you to think twice. Because the best that approach can ever deliver is mediocrity.