Cut Your Website Copy in Half
Rewriting web text to use about half the words improved measured usability by 58% in Nielsen Norman Group’s testing (Nielsen Norman Group, 1997). The content said the same things. It just used fewer words to say them.
What the research observed
Nielsen’s study compared versions of the same web content written in different styles and measured how well people could use each one. The concise version, cut to roughly half the length of the original, produced a 58% improvement in usability over the baseline (Nielsen Norman Group, 1997).
The study is old, but the reason it holds is simple. Most visitors scan web pages rather than reading them in full. Every extra sentence is one more thing to scan past on the way to the information they want. Shorter text means less to sort through and a faster path to the answer.
What it means for a business website
Business website copy tends to grow over time. An owner adds a paragraph about company values, a staff member adds a section on process, and a page that started at 300 words reaches 900. Much of that text repeats itself or describes the business in general terms instead of answering a visitor’s question.
Cutting it is usually faster and cheaper than redesigning the page. A layout change cannot fix a page where the useful sentence is buried in the fourth paragraph. Removing the three paragraphs above it can.
Cutting by half does not mean dropping facts. Prices, service areas, specifics, and steps stay. What goes is filler, repetition, and introductory sentences that delay the point.
What to do
- Pick your three most visited pages and set a target of half their current word count.
- Delete opening sentences that only introduce the topic, and start with the answer.
- Remove sentences that restate earlier points in different words.
- Finish cutting the copy before making layout or design changes.
Sources
- Nielsen. How Users Read on the Web. Nielsen Norman Group, 1997.