Web Design – How much text is too much?

Text - the poor relation

All too often text content is not given the thought and attention it deserves compared to its sexier cousins design & imagery but, we have to assume that if you include text on your web pages it serves some purpose and that purpose might either be to educate and inform, give an opinion, describe something or to entertain.

The human relationship with text

In some form or another, text has been around for thousands of years but, over time, our relationship with it has changed and evolved. The further you go back in history the more abridged the text becomes, just because it was more laborious and time-consuming to produce. Thus, if a message needed to be communicated it needed to be succinct and this forced the author of the text to really think hard about what they wanted to say and how they were going to say it. Of course, there were extensive and detailed religious texts being produced as early as the 5th Century but, examination reveals that the actual text content was often short and to the point with a lot of space taken up by elaborate images and graphical artefacts. These texts were also likely someone’s life’s work!

Over time, we humans became more adept at sharing texts and moved away from the inconvenience of carving hieroglyphs into cave walls and onto stone tablets and made text a lot more portable – we invented substrates such as papyrus and, later, paper and so, our texts could travel with us and, as writing became easier, texts became longer. The real sea change though didn’t come until around 1436 when Johannes Gutenberg invented “movable type”. That really opened the door to lengthier textual tomes. Then came the typewriter, then the word processor then the world wide web and now, as we speak, text generated by artificially intelligent software and each evolutionary step has increased the number of words recorded for posterity or, at least, until deleted.

Be more like Moses ...

Today in the Christian world, in Judaism and to some extent, in the Islamic world, the basic moral and legal tenants of the 10 commandments handed down by god and scribed by Moses, remain the cornerstones of society yet, depending on the version of the bible you read, all 10 commandments are conveyed in 300 words or less and, in their abridged versions only 60-70 words. Heck, I’m up to 434 in this article already!

If Moses made websites

Imagine Moses had the ability to record the 10 commandments on a website as God handed down the words of wisdom some 2,500 years ago. I doubt very much if the commandments would have been as succinct! I very much suspect that Moses would have felt the need to explain, over-explain, expand and over-egg the pudding and guild the lily somewhat. I suspect that each of the 10 commandments would have needed its own web page including a detailed explanation, examples, rules, exceptions, and not to mention Moses’ own interpretation and opinions along with intricate details of the fate awaiting transgressors!

Furthermore, I doubt that if the 10 Commandments had started out as a tome of biblical proportions (sorry!) it would have ever carried the weight that it continues to do today, simply because ordinary people would have never bothered to read it all.

Twitter may have got it right first time

Back in 2006 when Twitter launched it did something crazy – it limited the number of characters you could use to a mere 140! That’s all changed now and, if you have a “blue” account, you can use up to 10,000 characters but, back in the day, 140 it was. At first, users didn’t like it and the forums were full of people saying “Rubbish, won’t use it” but, despite the restriction, it became rather popular and one of the reasons for that was the bite-size snippets of wisdom were easy for us to consume and many more people learned to be succinct, direct and to the point.

The Human Attention Span

The average human attention span has decreased and continues to decrease over time. In 2015, a Microsoft study suggested the average attention span was 12 seconds at the turn of the millennium but had dropped to 8 seconds at the time of the report. There’s no actual reliable, factual data to support the theory but, anecdotally, it is thought that in 2023 the number is more like 5 seconds and falling. This is due to the increased prevalence of digital technology and the constant availability of information, leading to a more distracted and multitasking-oriented lifestyle and maintaining focused attention in the digital age can be challenging. In other words, we’re more easily distracted.

The measurement of human attention span is often misunderstood. Rather than indicating the average length of reader engagement, the measure is an indicator of how easily a reader might be distracted. This, in turn, doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t return to the page or article they are reading or the thing they were doing, although it’s less likely they will do so if the thing they were doing has not captured their interest in the first place.

How Line Lengths Can Hijack Your Attention

Whether it’s a right-to-left language (RTL) to LTR we human beings find long line lengths of text difficult to consume. It all stems from how we learned to read, the text we’ve read since and the media we read from most often, for example, books and newspapers. Our eyes are used to scanning text with just the movement of our eyeballs, there’s no requirement to move the head and that’s the way our brains like it. According to the Baynard Institute, a line length of 60-75 characters is optimal and anything longer or shorter risks losing the reader’s attention or can be detrimental to comprehension.

There are many factors which influence this ideal line length, including the size and typeface of the font, the amount of spacing between lines (also known as “leading”), the medium (e.g., paper, computer screen, mobile device), the content of the text, and the individual reader’s comfort but, if we aim for around the 60-75 characters per line, we’re unlikely to upset anyone and help to ensure their attention remains with us and, for us website creators, that usually means we should aim for text blocks no less than 500 pixels wide and no more than around 650 pixels wide.

Text Feast or famine

For creators of websites how little or how much text we have to work with is a constant challenge, especially if the client provides it.

Don't let the SEO Tail Wag the Dog!

Much has been written about how many words a page should contain in order to satisfy the gods of the search ranking algorithms and much of it is based on myth and is now outdated. Probably more than any other factor, the quest for higher SERPS rankings has been responsible for text bloat on many websites, especially blogs. One reference source stated a minimum of 3,000 words for “best SEO” and another states a maximum of 1,000 so, which is right?

Well, neither of them as it happens. In 2023 the correct answer is “as much as it takes to get the point across. No more and no less”.

But what about the code to text ratio?

Nobody really knows the source but, at some point, some SEO “Guru” decided there was a right and a wrong ratio of code to text and if code exceeded text, the wrath of the SEO gods would descend upon you! It probably stems from the thinking that too much content overall on a web page might make it slower but, even that’s debatable these days. The true answer here in 2024 is that Google doesn’t care one bit about code-to-text ratio providing the text satisfies the needs of the end-user and the code is reasonably well constructed with a strong nod to semantics structure.

Ancient Geekery