Website Content: How Much Do You Need?

As you may know if you always read my blog and have total recall, I teach writing to college students in my spare time. One of the questions they frequently ask is, "How long should the paper be?"

I invariably tell them, "As long as it needs to be to say what you have to say."

This is a good answer for a writing class, but it's a rotten answer to "How long should the content at my website be?" That's because there are other factors.

For one thing, you need search engines to find your site, understand what it's for, and offer it to the right people. Robots aren't as good at getting the nuances of human language as humans are, so this can require more text, and more overt use of key phrases, than content written just for people.

For another, your human visitors spend just a few seconds scanning your homepage before they make up their minds about whether to go or stay. That means that you have to write your pages to be scanned, not just to be read.

Finally, you have to work with the design, too -- not an issue for term papers.

So how much content do you need? Check out a few examples. Above is a homepage I wrote for web design firm Sharp Hue. It has 135 words, and you can see them all in that one screenshot. Nearly every single word is an essential keyword. This is a small amount of content, but it's very efficient. If you want to keep text to a minimum, you have to make sure that every word counts -- while still keeping it in the form of natural English sentences that will appeal to your readers.




I usually find that 280 words is about the minimum you can use and get excellent results. But that general figure can look very different from one site to another. The site above, with 280 words, has a traditional page of text in paragraphs. Visitors can tell immediately what this site is for, so we can give them something to read, confident that those who don't need more information will go ahead and take action without reading all the text.




This site, for web development firm Onsharp, has 317 words. It's only about 20 words more than the previous example, but the layout and graphics create a completely different effect. Their product requires a lot of explanation, so they have brief bits that lead to more detail on other pages. This allows a scannable homepage without sacrificing the information their visitors need.



Littlefish IT is another 280 word homepage (though I did a total of about 10,000 words for their site -- in their testing, they found that content really is king). They like to have an attention-grabbing intro above the fold, followed by more detail below it, which is mostly directed toward search engines. Their pages may have up to 480 words, but they're designed to satisfy the non-scrolling visitors as well as those who want more detail.

It's okay to have more than your visitors will read, as long as you've designed the page to do its job whether people read all of it or not. And it's okay to have minimal text as long as you have enough information for search engine robots to discern your purpose.