Making your website copy better, one edit at a time

Quick answer

Improve website copy by making one kind of edit at a time rather than rewriting everything at once. Read the page several times, each time with a single job: cut the throat-clearing, put the customer first, swap vague claims for specifics, shorten sentences, sharpen headings and end with one clear next step. Each pass takes minutes.

Here is a sentence from a real-sounding plumber’s homepage: “Welcome to our website. We are a family-run business with many years of experience providing a wide range of plumbing services to customers across the area.” Nothing in it is false. Nothing in it would make anyone pick up the phone. The fix is not a copywriter’s genius; it is six small, separate edits, each one easy on its own. This guide takes you through them in order.

Why one edit at a time works

When people sit down to “improve the website copy”, they try to fix tone, length, structure, grammar and persuasion in the same read. The brain cannot hold all of that, so the result is either a page that is barely changed or a full rewrite that loses the good parts. Single-purpose passes are faster and kinder. You only look for one thing, you find more of it, and you can stop after any pass with a better page than you started with.

Print the page or paste it into a document. Work on one page at a time, starting with the one that gets the most visitors, usually the homepage or your main service page.

The six edits, in order

Pass 1: cut the warm-up

Most pages start a paragraph too early. “Welcome to our website”, “We are delighted you have found us” and “In today’s fast-paced world” are the writer warming up. Delete the first sentence of every section and read what is left. Nine times out of ten the second sentence is the real start. Visitors scan before they read, as Nielsen Norman Group’s research on how people read on the web shows, so the first words of every paragraph carry the weight.

Pass 2: put the customer first

Count how many sentences start with “we” or “our”. On most small business sites it is most of them. Turn some around so the customer is the subject: what they get, what problem goes away, what they can do next. You will not remove every “we” and you should not; people want to know who they are dealing with. But a page that talks about the reader’s problem before the business’s history reads as helpful rather than boastful.

Pass 3: swap claims for proof

“High quality”, “reliable”, “competitive prices”, “friendly service”. Every competitor says the same, so the words carry no information. On this pass, underline every adjective that praises the business and ask: what is the evidence? Then write the evidence instead. Years trading, areas covered, a named accreditation, a guarantee you actually offer, a real price, a short customer quote with permission. If there is no evidence, cut the claim.

Pass 4: shorten the sentences

Read the page aloud. Anywhere you run out of breath, split the sentence. Anywhere you trip, rewrite it. Swap long words for short ones where the meaning holds: “use” for “utilise”, “help” for “facilitate”, “about” for “approximately”. The Plain English Campaign has free guides on this, and the UK government’s writing standards are a good model for clear, direct copy that still sounds human.

Pass 5: make headings do the work

Many visitors read only the headings. If your headings are labels (“About us”, “Services”, “Why choose us”), a scanner learns nothing. Rewrite each one so it says something on its own: “Kitchens fitted in five days, start to finish” tells the reader more than “Our process”. Search engines read headings too, so naturally including the words customers use helps; our guide to writing content for search covers that without turning your copy into keyword soup.

Pass 6: end with one clear next step

Look at the last screen of every page. Does it tell the visitor exactly what to do? “Get in touch” is a shrug. “Call now for a same-week quote” or “Book your free survey online” is an instruction. One action per page works better than four, and it should match what the page has just talked about.

Check the result with a stranger

When you have finished all six passes, give the page to someone who does not know your business and ask them three questions after thirty seconds: what does this business do, who is it for, and what should I do next? If they cannot answer all three, go back to passes one and five. It is the cheapest usability test there is, and it catches problems you cannot see because you know the business too well.

When editing is not enough

Editing makes good pages better. It cannot fix a page that has no clear purpose, or a site where every page tries to do everything. If you get to pass six and still cannot say who the page is for and what they should do, the problem is structure, not wording. Our guide to planning website content helps with that, and our website copywriting cost guide explains what it costs to have it written for you.

If you would rather hand the words over, our content marketing and blog writing service starts at £199 a month for researched, original copy. When the site itself is holding the words back, a custom WordPress website from £499 or a focused landing page from £199 gives them room to work. Every Luxbranding price is on our pricing page.