Long enough to answer the question the reader arrived with and support the decision they are making. A booking page might need eighty words; a page about a costly irreversible choice might need three thousand.

The question is asked in the wrong unit

How many words should this page be is a question about volume, and volume is not a property anybody reading the page cares about.

The reader has arrived with something they want to know and a decision they are trying to make.

The page is finished when it has done that, and the number of words that took is a result rather than a target.

Asking the question the other way round is how sites end up with eleven hundred words of padding around three hundred words of content.

Where the numbers come from

You will have seen figures asserted with confidence: three hundred minimum, two thousand for ranking, seven hundred for a blog post.

These come mostly from correlation studies observing that longer pages often rank better, which is true and widely misread.

Thorough pages tend to be longer because thoroughness takes words. Length is a symptom of covering a subject properly, not a cause of ranking.

Padding a three-hundred-word answer to two thousand produces a long page that is worse, and every reader who bounces off it makes it worse still.

The decision decides the length

The useful question is what the reader is deciding and how much they need to decide it.

Deciding whether to click a booking button needs almost nothing: what it is, what it costs, when it happens.

Deciding whether to phone a supplier needs a bit more: what you do, evidence you do it, and why you rather than the next result.

Deciding whether to spend a significant sum on something irreversible needs a great deal: options, trade-offs, what goes wrong, and what it depends on.

A page serving the third decision in four hundred words has failed. A page serving the first in four thousand has also failed.

Rough shapes

These are observations of what tends to be needed, not targets. Any of them is wrong for a specific page where the decision is bigger or smaller than usual.

Length is not the same as scrolling

A long page and a page that feels long are different things, and the difference is structure.

Two thousand words with clear headings, short paragraphs, and a summary near the top is easy, because the reader can find their part and skip the rest.

Eight hundred words in four dense blocks with no headings feels longer than the two thousand, and is abandoned more often.

So the practical constraint is rarely how much you write. It is whether somebody can navigate it and leave with what they came for, which is a formatting problem rather than a word-count one.

Answer early, then expand

The structure that resolves most length arguments.

Put the short answer in the first two sentences, so anybody who reads no further has still been served.

Then expand, qualify, and cover the exceptions underneath for the people who need them.

This lets one page serve both the reader in a hurry and the reader making a large decision, without compromising for either.

It also removes the temptation to hold the answer back to keep people reading, which readers recognise and resent.

A worked example

A specialist installer had a services section where every page ran to about eleven hundred words because a previous agency had set that as a standard.

Two pages genuinely warranted it: complex installations where customers were choosing between real alternatives.

Six did not. Those covered straightforward jobs where the honest answer was what it is, what it costs, roughly how long, and what to do next, which is about three hundred words.

The remaining eight hundred on each was restatement, generic industry background, and a section about their commitment to quality.

They cut the six to around three hundred and fifty and expanded the two complex ones to about two thousand.

Total words on the site fell by roughly a third. Enquiries from those pages rose, and the two long pages became the best-performing content they had.

Signs a page is too short

People phone to ask something the page ought to have covered, which is the clearest signal available and it is free.

Visitors arrive and immediately leave for another page on your site, suggesting they did not find what they expected.

You find yourself sending the same clarifying email after people read it.

Or the page makes a claim and offers nothing to support it, which is the most common form of too short: not the absence of words but the absence of evidence.

Signs a page is too long

The answer to the title does not appear until halfway down.

Whole sections could be deleted without anybody noticing, which is usually true of introductions explaining why the topic matters.

The same point is made three times in different words, a habit that arrives when writing to a target.

And there is generic background the reader already knows, included because the page felt thin without it.

The test is per section rather than overall: ask what each one does for somebody making the decision, and cut the ones with no answer.

The counter-case

There is a real argument for length beyond what the immediate reader requires.

A thorough page covers more of the ways people phrase a question, so it can be found by searches a shorter page misses, and that breadth is legitimate rather than padding.

Some subjects also genuinely need the reader to understand context before the answer means anything, and cutting to the answer leaves them unable to use it.

The distinction is whether the additional material serves a reader or serves a word count. Extra sections answering adjacent questions somebody actually has are useful; extra paragraphs restating the introduction are not.

Deciding for a given page

  1. Name the decision the reader is making.
  2. List what they need to make it.
  3. Write that, and stop.
  4. Put the short answer in the first two sentences.
  5. Check each section against the decision, and cut the rest.
  6. Add headings so it can be navigated rather than read.
  7. Ignore the resulting number.

Done that way, the pages that need to be long end up long, and nothing is long by accident.

Writing for people who are not reading carefully is covered in writing for somebody in a hurry.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a web page be?

Long enough to support the decision the reader is making. A booking page may need under a hundred words; a page about a costly irreversible choice may need several thousand.

Do longer pages rank better?

Thorough pages tend to be longer because thoroughness takes words. Length is a symptom of covering a subject properly, not a cause, and padding makes a page worse.

Is there a minimum word count?

No. Minimums produce padding around a short answer, and every reader who bounces off the padding makes the page perform worse.

How do I know a page is too short?

People phone to ask something it should have covered, visitors leave immediately for another page, or the page makes claims with nothing supporting them.

How do I know a page is too long?

The answer does not appear until halfway down, sections could be deleted unnoticed, or the same point is made three times in different words.

Where should the answer go?

In the first two sentences, with the detail and exceptions underneath. That serves the reader in a hurry and the one making a large decision on the same page.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Writing to a word count?

Name the decision, list what it needs, write that, and stop. The number is a result, not a target.

Start a Conversation