Cut your copy in half. Nobody will miss it.
In a classic web-writing study, cutting the word count roughly in half made a site 58% more usable.
Founders write landing pages like they’re paid by the word. Every feature, every caveat, every “we believe.” Readers pay for all of it in effort, and they’d rather not.
In 1997, John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen tested rewrites of a travel site about Nebraska. The concise version, at about half the word count of the original, scored 58% higher in measured usability, a score built from measures like task time, errors, memory and satisfaction. A version stripped of boasting and exaggeration scored 27% higher. Combining concise, scannable and objective writing scored 124% higher. It’s a 1997 study, so treat the exact numbers as history, not a forecast for your page.
Take your longest section and cut it to half its length. Delete warm-up sentences, repeated points and anything that starts with “we believe.” If nothing important broke, it was padding.
The example
- Instead of
- “We believe every team deserves a better way to collaborate, which is why we built a powerful, flexible solution.”
- Try
- “Shared to-do lists for small teams. Free for up to 5 people.”
Before you flush
Pick the longest paragraph on your homepage and cut it to half its word count without losing a single fact.