Insights · Copywriting
Copywriting · 6 min read
There is a measured cost to promotional writing. Not a theory — a number, from a controlled study. Removing marketing language from a website improved its usability by 27%. Doing three things at once improved it by 124%.
Most homepage copy is written by committee, approved by consensus, and read by nobody. It contains phrases such as a leading provider of innovative solutions and committed to delivering excellence, and it performs the remarkable trick of occupying the most valuable space on the internet while communicating nothing whatsoever.
This is not a matter of taste. It has been measured.
John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen ran a controlled study with 51 experienced web users, comparing five versions of the same website. Against the promotional control version — the one written in ordinary marketing language — they measured usability improvements of:
Nineteen of the twenty mean scores for the combined version beat the control. That 27% figure is the one to hold onto: it is the isolated cost of writing promotionally, independent of length or formatting. Simply removing the self-congratulation, changing nothing else, made the site measurably better to use.
Analysis of 45,237 real page views established the baseline: on an average page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words, and 20% is more likely. Each additional 100 words costs about 4.4 seconds of attention, of which roughly 18% of the added text actually gets read.
The average page in that dataset ran to 593 words. Pages of 111 words or fewer allow a visitor to read about half the content in a typical visit.
So the calculation on your homepage is not "what would I like to say." It is "which forty words do I want to be the ones they see."
This one is counter-intuitive enough to be worth stating precisely. Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton ran five experiments substituting needlessly complex vocabulary into graduate school applications, sociology abstracts and translations of Descartes. The finding: writers who use long words unnecessarily are judged less intelligent.
His own summary: "write as simply and plainly as possible and it's more likely you'll be thought of as intelligent."
Nielsen Norman found the same effect in a commercial context: "Complicated or jargon-filled writing can be perceived as written by someone who wants to sound intelligent but may not actually be intelligent, or with the intent to mislead customers."
And for anyone about to argue that their audience is technical — Nielsen Norman tested plain language with experts in science, technology and medicine and found "even highly educated online readers crave succinct information that is easy to scan." A university professor, on a government research site: "This is crazy dense. It's too much. I'd rather have less."
A double-blind study of 50 participants compared an original pharmaceutical website against a rewritten, plainer version. Task success among lower-literacy users rose from 46% to 82%. Among higher-literacy users it rose from 68% to 93%, with task time falling from 14.3 minutes to 5.1.
All differences were statistically significant. Writing clearly is not writing down. It improved outcomes for the most capable readers by the largest absolute margin.
The target to aim for, per Nielsen Norman: eighth-grade reading level for a broad consumer audience, twelfth-grade for an educated or business audience — in both cases several levels below the audience's actual education.
Jakob Nielsen proposed a diagnostic for taglines and value propositions that takes ten seconds and is devastating. Of any sentence on your homepage, ask:
Take "We are committed to delivering high-quality, cost-effective solutions tailored to our clients' needs." Would a rival say it? Word for word. Would anyone advertise being uncommitted, low-quality, expensive and generic? No.
The sentence therefore carries zero information. It is not a weak claim. It is the absence of a claim, wearing the costume of one. Nielsen's verdict on this genre of writing: "the company is still paying copywriters to avoid communicating with prospective customers."
Nielsen Norman's homepage guidance: treat it as an elevator pitch that "quickly and clearly convey[s] what your organization does and what users can accomplish on your site."
Before: Transforming businesses through innovative digital solutions. After: We build websites for Irish businesses, and we write the words that make them work. The second is duller to write and vastly more useful to read.
Every adjective you delete should be replaced by something verifiable. Not fast but most of our sites load in under two seconds on 4G. Not experienced but fourteen years, three hundred sites. Not affordable but the actual range.
An adjective is a claim you are asking the reader to take on trust from a stranger. A number is evidence. The reader does the work of being impressed, which is far more persuasive than being told to be.
Baymard's research on homepages found that 22% of sites fail to convey an adequate range of what they offer, leaving visitors to guess. Abstraction is the enemy: "digital solutions" tells a reader nothing about whether you do the specific thing they came for. List the services. Name them the way a customer would.
The 58% and 47% improvements above came from conciseness and scannability separately. Both are available to you this afternoon without changing a single argument.
Front-load the first two paragraphs. Use headings that say something — Nielsen Norman's eyetracking shows readers fixate on headings and dip into body text between them, but only when the headings are descriptive and visually distinct. "Our Approach" gives the eye nothing. "We do not use templates, and here is what that costs you" gives it a reason to stop.
"Link labels and calls to action should be specific and have high information scent. Generic language like Click Here, Explore, or Learn More does not tell users what they will get."
See what a website costs is a better button than Get Started, because the reader knows exactly what is on the other side of it.
Print your homepage. Take a pen. Strike through every sentence that fails the two questions. Then read what survives.
For most businesses this reduces a page of six hundred words to about eighty. Those eighty words are the only ones that were ever doing anything. Everything else was insulation — comfortable to write, reassuring to approve, and quietly costing you 27% before anyone read a single specific claim.
Now rebuild from those eighty words. Add only what a sceptical stranger would need in order to make a decision: what you do, who for, what it costs, what happens next, and why anyone should believe you.
That is a homepage. The rest was never writing. It was avoidance.
If you would like us to run the two questions over your own homepage and send you back what survives, we will — and we will be honest if the answer is "most of it, actually." Your vision, built to perform.
Morkes & Nielsen, "Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web" (1997), Nielsen Norman Group · Nielsen Norman Group: How Little Do Users Read (2008, analysing Weinreich et al., ACM Transactions on the Web), Tagline Blues, Plain Language Is for Everyone Even Experts, Lower-Literacy Users, Legibility Readability and Comprehension, Layer-Cake Pattern, F-Shaped Pattern, Homepage Design: 5 Fundamental Principles, What B2B Designers Can Learn from B2C About Building Trust · Oppenheimer (2006), Applied Cognitive Psychology 20(2), DOI 10.1002/acp.1178 · Baymard Institute, E-Commerce Home Page Focus.
All sources verified live on 7 August 2026. We have deliberately not cited any "clearer value proposition increases conversions by X%" figure, because every such claim we could find traces to unpublished proprietary vendor testing rather than research.
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