On the web, content is king. Can you have too much of a good thing?
That answer is Yes! The rule-of-thumb on the web is always “less is more”. When you go to a website looking for answers you don’t want to be bombarded with a lot of text, right? Your website visitors don’t want to either.
Think of it this way: your web visitor is meeting you for the very first time. They don’t need to know the life story of your business right away. It’s too much. Give them a taste, just enough to get them to take the next step.
A Word document can hold about 500 words per page. That’s good for about two web pages on your site.
So, how long should your page be? At what point do people’s eyes start to glaze over?
*Note these numbers are NOT written in stone. You can break up text with something visual about every 100 words or so.
Regular website page: approx. 200 words with images
Squeeze page: approx. 100 words
Sales page: at least 500 words (I’ve seen sales pages with 7,500 words!)
Blog post: approx. 350 words
Article: at least 750 words
Something that’s coming into fashion is the very long 1-page websites that are broken up into sections rather than pages. Treat each section as if it’s its own page. So each section will get no more than 100-200 words broken up by images.
So what do you do if your web pages have more words than is recommended?
- Can you move some of what you are saying to another page?
- Can you say it with pictures?
- Do you really need to say it all at that time?
I hope this rule-of-thumb helps you to move your website visitors through your website and into your sales funnel more easily.