Nobody reads your page. They scan it.
People scan web pages in a rough F-shape. Put the words that matter where eyes actually land.
You polished every sentence on your landing page. Many visitors will only see a handful of them. Not because they’re rude, because they’re busy.
Nielsen Norman Group’s eyetracking research keeps finding the same habit: on text-heavy pages, eyes sweep across the top, then run down the left edge, forming a rough F. It’s the default when nothing on the page signals where the important stuff is. NN/g first described the pattern in 2006 and still found it years later, on phones too. Their advice for writers: put the most important points in the first two paragraphs, start headings with the words that carry the most information, and bold the key phrases.
Test your own page. Read only the headings and the first two words of each paragraph. If that skim doesn’t tell the story, rewrite until it does.
The example
- Instead of
- “A new way to think about how your team handles customer conversations”
- Try
- “Shared support inbox: every email assigned, nothing answered twice”
Before you flush
Read only the headings and first two words of each paragraph on your homepage. Rewrite any heading that makes no sense on its own.