A woman in Calicut is on her phone, looking at a kurti on a boutique’s website. The description reads “Elegant, perfect for every occasion, premium quality fabric, crafted with love.” She has three practical questions. Is the cotton thin enough for the humidity, do the sizes run small, and can she wear it to work? The page answers none of them, so she closes it and opens another shop’s.

The boutique and the customer are invented, but anyone who has tried to buy from a page that sounded nice and said little will recognise the situation. The owner wrote something pleasant. The customer needed something useful. The sale went elsewhere, and nobody ever found out why.

Readers sample before they study

Most people don’t read a web page so much as test it. Nielsen Norman Group, which has studied online reading with eye tracking for years, estimated in 2008 that visitors take in about a fifth of the words on an average page. The participants in that research were better educated than the general public and the figures are close to two decades old, so I wouldn’t quote the number as a rule. The behaviour behind it still matches what most of us do. We look for the thing we came for and leave if it takes too long to appear.

For a business owner, this changes what a sentence is for. Each line has to show quickly that it concerns the person reading it. “Welcome to our website” doesn’t. “Custom cakes in Calicut, baked to order” does.

Vague words cost the reader effort

Psychologists describe the strain of holding and processing information as cognitive load. John Sweller developed the idea in the 1980s while studying how people learn to solve problems, and its starting point is that working memory, the small space we think in, has strict limits. When some of that space is spent on things that don’t matter, less is left for the thing that does. Sweller was studying learning, not shopping, so applying his theory to product pages is my own interpretation and not something his work tested.

It is a useful lens all the same. A phrase like “premium quality” asks the reader to work out what premium means for this particular kurti, and a reader who is only half committed will usually decline the task. One such phrase costs almost nothing. A page made of them starts to feel like homework.

Clear writing has a second job, which is to be believed. Research on processing fluency suggests that information that is easy to process tends to feel more likeable and more true. A 2024 overview by Wänke and Undorf lists effects on liking, judgments of truth and confidence, and notes that researchers disagree about whether different kinds of fluency behave alike, which challenges the influential 2009 review by Alter and Oppenheimer. I take a modest lesson from this. Plain language helps, but a smooth sentence with nothing behind it, such as “we provide the best service”, gives the reader nothing to check, and easy reading can’t make up for that.

What specific copy looks like

The quickest way to see the difference is to rewrite a few lines. The businesses below are invented, so swap in your own details.

A home bakery’s headline might read “Delicious cakes made with love”, which could sit on any bakery’s page in any city. “Custom birthday cakes in Calicut, baked to order” tells the reader what is sold, where and how. Google’s helpful content guidance asks whether a page’s main heading gives a descriptive, helpful summary, and the same test works for headlines.

Now the boutique’s description. A stronger version would say that it is a light cotton kurti with a straight cut and a knee-length hem, that the fabric is not sheer so it suits office days, that sizes run from S to XXL with a chart below, and that it can be machine washed. Those few facts answer the questions from the opening scene. The phrase I dropped, “perfect for every occasion”, promised everything and therefore told the reader nothing.

A dental clinic might introduce itself as a team of dedicated professionals committed to excellence. Any clinic could say that. A more useful paragraph would explain that it is a small clinic in Calicut with two dentists, that most first visits are a check-up and a clean, that treatment and cost are explained before anything begins, and that it is open Monday to Saturday, 9 am to 6 pm. A nervous first-time patient can picture that visit, and picturing it removes some of the uncertainty that stops people from calling.

Content that fills a page and content that does a job

Filler usually begins with a sensible thought. A website ought to have an About page, a services page and a blog, so someone writes words to occupy them. The pages exist, and they are aimed at nobody.

I use a simple test. A piece of content should have a reader in mind, a question that reader is asking, and a next step they can take. A page called “Five reasons to choose us” has none of the three. A page written for someone choosing a dentist for the first time, explaining what happens at the first appointment and what it costs, and ending with how to book, has all of them. It is narrower, which makes it easier to write and easier to judge, because you can see whether the reader found the answer and took the step. Google’s guidance makes a similar point from the search side. It describes people-first content as content made mainly to help people, and cautions against content made mainly to attract search traffic.

You can run the test on any paragraph on your site. Ask who is reading it and what they want to know. Ask whether a stranger could repeat what you offer after ten seconds. Look for claims that can be pictured or checked, and replace words like “premium” with the fabric, the process, the price range or the opening hours. Then make sure the next step is obvious. The most reliable check is to hand the page to someone outside your business and ask what they think you sell. Their answer will be more accurate than yours.

Conclusion

None of this calls for a bigger vocabulary. Most of the improvement comes from swapping a general statement for a specific one and seeing whether a stranger understands it. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your website’s wording, I’m happy to take a look.