Jakob Nielsen at Nielsen Norman Group analysed over 45,000 page views and found that on an average web page, visitors read at most 28% of the words during a visit. Twenty percent is more realistic. Chartbeat looked at two billion visits and found that 55% of visitors spent fewer than fifteen seconds actively on a page.

What that means in practice:

Page length	Words actually read	What this means
100 words	~20 words	Short pages are far more likely to be read in full
250 words	~50 words	Enough for a strong intro — not enough for fluff
500 words	~100 words	Visitors catch headings, opening lines, standout proof
1,000 words	~200 words	Only motivated readers engage deeply; everyone else scans

So the question is not how many words your website has. The question is whether the words that actually get read are doing any work.

What visitors actually experience

The visitor does not experience your website as a complete essay. They experience fragments: headline, first few lines, one or two subheadings, a proof point, maybe a price anchor, then a decision about whether to continue or leave.

This is why so many pages feel fine to the business owner but fail to convert. The owner has read every word — they wrote every word. They know the argument the page is making, they can feel the logic of it, and it seems compelling to them. The visitor, scanning for relevance in under fifteen seconds, never gets far enough into it to feel any of that.

The page that converts is not the most thorough one. It is the one that lands its most important point in the words the visitor is actually going to read.

The words that get wasted

Now look at your website. Find the words in the first screen — the headline, the opening line, the first subheading. These are the words that get read. Ask yourself honestly: are they saying something that only you could say?

Or are they saying something like this:

Think about “inclusive.” Nearly every photographer uses that word now. It has stopped being a differentiator and become a baseline expectation — wallpaper. Using it does not tell a client anything meaningful about you. It tells them you are the same as everyone else who has also used it.

“Luxury” is the same problem. Who is not luxury? The word has been applied so broadly and so often that it carries almost no information. It is a word that feels like it is saying something while saying nothing at all.

“Authentic.” “Timeless.” “Unforgettable.” These words appear on so many photography websites that they have lost all meaning entirely. A couple scanning your homepage in twelve seconds does not feel authenticity from the word authentic. They feel it — or they do not — from something specific and real that you say or show.

What to say instead

The words that convert are specific. They describe a real situation, a real feeling, a real person. They make the right reader think “that is me” — and make the wrong reader self-select out. Both of those outcomes are good.

Specificity is the differentiator. Not “luxury elopement photographer” but the specific thing you do, where you do it, and why it is different. This is closely related to what your portfolio is actually saying — the two problems usually exist together. Not “inclusive” but the actual thing that makes your clients feel welcome — shown through copy, imagery, and the kind of work you put on your website.

This is not about being clever. It is not about hiring a copywriter to make your website sound more interesting. It is about being clear — about who you are, who your work is for, and what makes it worth the price you charge. That clarity, in the words that actually get read, is what converts a visitor into an enquiry.

Everything else is background noise that nobody was reading anyway. If you want to go deeper on the underlying business problems, the resources page has a free guide and pricing calculator worth looking at.