Save your customers from the great wall of text

By Ilana Davis

Ecommerce sites need to have enough information to get your visitor what they need to make a purchase but not so much information their eyes can’t focus.

There’s a fine line between a website with text and text that just so happens to be on a website.

How do I know if you have too much text?

I was reading through a customer’s Shopify site today and noticed my eyes couldn’t focus on the row of text I was reading. It was a large paragraph that did have headers, but not a lot of spacing between the paragraphs.

So when I kept trying to find where I got lost, it was proving to be more difficult as my eyes glossed over.

That’s when it hit me. There was too much text on this page and not enough space.

Next time you look at your website, sit back in your chair and let your eyes relax a bit. What do you see?

If you see a bunch of text, you’ve got too much. If you see various images, text, and white space, you’re probably in good shape.

How can I fix my wall of text?

Paragraph text should be around 80 characters long before it moves down to the next row.

If you notice, my paragraphs above are not the 5 sentence paragraphs we were taught in school.

I break paragraphs out by thought or by 2-3 sentences at most. Breaking paragraphs into smaller chunks allow you to easily keep track of where you are without feeling like you need to use your finger or a ruler.

Another great solution is to break it up with bold headings, an image, or white space. This allows your visitors to visually and mentally bookmark where they left off and find that section later.

If you’re concerned that content issues like this are impacting conversions on your Shopify site, you might consider buying my Website Review. I’ll take a look at your site and provide feedback like this and dozens of others that could salvage your website.

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