If you haven’t updated your website in a while you may have some monster pages that need to be trimmed down to work with mobile viewing patterns and our shorter attention spans.
So how long is too long?
If you have to scroll, scroll, scroll, and them scroll some more to get to the bottom of your page on a desktop screen, just think how much more scrolling you would be doing if you were on a smartphone or tablet. In fact, think about how you yourself use the web on a device, rarely will you scroll to the bottom of the page unless it is something you are really interested in. For that matter really long pages may not even load in a smartphone or may take so long that a reader simply clicks back to leave – I’ve done that and I’m sure you have too.
A good rule of thumb is that if a page is more than 1.5 Word document pages it should be shortened and turned into multiple pages. Typically a single page of a Word document is about 500 words. So get close to 800 to 1,000 and up and you really should be thinking of getting out the chopper.
Are there different topics on the same page?
Another good way to look at your own website page is to see if you are hopping around on topics. On that super long page, do you start talking about ants and then talk about each species of ant and then talk about termites too?
It is by far better to have content on one topic on one page and when you move to a new topic create a new page.
Make sure to test your update pages using a smartphone and a tablet. Doing so will give you a really good idea of when you get fatigued with scrolling and need to take the knife out to start trimming up your content.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that your old website is good enough, the mobile space is and has changed everything when it comes to presenting your message on the web. Find out how we can help you trim, adjust, and revise your content to be more concise or to decide where breaks or content should be scrapped.