How to Get Busy Customers Reading Your Website

4 min readFeb 18

Let’s face it, people are busy these days. We are overloaded with information and in every corner of the internet, there's someone selling you something. That’s where the saying “users don’t read, they scan” comes from. If we read every word on every website we visit, we would never get anything done.

Studies say that only 16% of website users actually read a website word-for-word. But the words on your website are what sells your service right?

Right, so you need to design your website to help your customers to understand your message without actually reading every word. In this article, I’ll outline 4 ways to do that, in order to keep your website conversions high.

But before we get to that, it's really important to make sure that your overall message is clear. If your customers can’t understand your message, then they won’t be able to buy from you. Before designing your website you should have a really clear idea of who your customer is, what their problem is, and how your service solves their problem.

Once you have that in place, it will be much easier to design your website. So, now onto those 4 ways to get your busy customers to read your website without reading every word.

#1: Stop using huge paragraphs

I get it — there’s so much you want to say to your customers.

But huge paragraphs take a lot of effort to read and most people probably won’t even bother. Wide paragraphs are also very hard to read because your eyes need to do more work. What to do instead:

Split up huge blocks of text into smaller paragraphs of 3–5 sentences each
Don’t stretch paragraphs across the full width of the screen — use at least 2 columns on your website
Think “less is more” - how can you get your point across in the least amount of words possible?