How to Write Website Copy That Works (Even If You’re Not a Writer)

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Not sure how to write website copy that will help you actually achieve your goals?

If you’re not a professional copywriter, it can be tough to know where to begin when it comes to writing copy for your website. But with some niche-agnostic best practices and tools, even people who don’t do copywriting for a living can create website copy that’s good enough to achieve results.

In this post, you’re going to learn exactly what those best practices and tools are. By the end of it, you should have a good idea of what you need to do and how you can start writing the copy for your website, including some special tips for key pages on your site.

In this article:

Let’s get right to it, starting at the beginning…

What Does Effective Website Copy Accomplish?

If you’re reading this post, you probably already know that quality website copy is important. But why exactly is it important, and what does quality website copy help you achieve?

While there are a lot of different reasons to care about website copy, pretty much every website will want to use copywriting to help achieve these four fundamental goals…

Educate Visitors About Your Offerings

To start, you want your website copy to clearly communicate what you offer and how your offerings will improve your visitors’ lives.

This could be physical or digital products that you’re selling, services that you’re offering, content/knowledge that you’re providing (via a blog, a newsletter, etc.), and so on.

Basically, you want your visitors to have all the information they need to make an informed decision about your offerings.

Communicate Your Brand’s Identify and Build a Connection

Your website copy also plays an important role in establishing your brand’s identity, which can help you start building a connection with visitors.

Are you playful and humorous? Or are you formal and by the book?

Because your website copy might be the first interaction with your brand for a lot of visitors, your website copy can instantly start showcasing these elements in your brand identity.

Convert Visitors Into Customers

Beyond showcasing your offerings, you’ll also want your website copy to “convert” your visitors.

Essentially, this means getting visitors to take whatever action it is you want them to do, whether that’s purchasing a product, hiring you for your services, joining your email list, and so on.

Even small changes to your website copy can make a big difference. For example, just changing the text of a headline or CTA button can sometimes make a meaningful improvement in terms of driving users to action.

Optimize Your Pages for Search Engines

Finally, your website copy also plays an essential role in helping you rank your website’s pages in search engines like Google.

While a lot of people focus on optimizing blog posts for organic traffic, it’s just as important to apply the same focus to your website pages as well.

If you’re selling products/services to your visitors, these core pages might be some of the best-converting pages on your site.

Eight General Best Practices and Tips for Writing Website Copy

Now, let’s move into some more actionable tips for how to write website copy that will help you achieve the benefits from the previous section.

Here are eight best practices for how to write copy for a website:

Understand who your audience is
Understand the purpose of each page
Use an optimized structure
Incorporate SEO best practices in your website copy
Keep things short and concise
Stay consistent across your website
Showcase benefits over features (most of the time)
Don’t be afraid to test and experiment

1. Understand Who Your Audience Is

Before you get to any other tips on how to write website copy, you first need to start at the beginning – your audience.

If you don’t understand who’s going to be reading your website copy, you won’t be able to create the optimal experience for your visitors.

For example, let’s say you’re writing copy for your website where you plan to offer online weightlifting coaching services.

If your audience is primarily beginners who have never set foot in a gym, your website copy will need to be radically different versus a situation where your audience is primarily experienced powerlifters who are looking to take their workouts to the next level.

To put this to paper, you can write down a customer persona. We have guides on how to develop customer personas and use them in marketing.

Once you’ve finalized your target audience, you can implement the rest of these website copy best practices in a way that best connects with your audience.

2. Understand the Purpose of Each Page

In addition to understanding who your website’s audience is, it’s also important to understand the purpose of each page on your website. Different pages will have different “goals”, which will affect how you write your website copy.

For example, if you offer a lot of discrete products/services, your homepage might serve as a funnel to send people to those feature pages and convert them there.

On the other hand, if you only offer a single product/service, the goal of your homepage might be to convert users right on the homepage.

To make this clear, you might find it helpful to actually write down what you hope to accomplish with each page. That way, you can tailor all of your website copy to help you achieve that goal.

We say “goal” and not “goals” because you usually want to focus on a single goal for each page. If you try to make your page accomplish a bunch of different things, you’ll often find that this makes the page less effective at everything.

3. Use an Optimized Structure

If you browse around to different websites, you’ll notice a common structure for most website copy:

Heading – the heading is the “main” text at the top. It typically has a larger font size and uses HTML heading tags such as <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and so on. It’s typically shorter in length than other text on the page.
Subheading – the subheading goes below the main heading. It typically uses a smaller font size which allows you to use more words in the subheading. You want to use your subheadings to expand on the text/idea in the main heading.
Images/icons – while images and icons aren’t part of website copy themselves, they do usually play an important role in the structure of your page and can help draw attention to your most important headings and subheadings.

Here’s a great example of this structure from the homepage of Toggl, a time-tracking tool:

Example site structure from Toggl home page

As you get further down the page, you can start breaking this structure and including longer blocks of text as needed.

For example, if you scroll down the Toggl homepage, you can start to see some longer blocks of text copy:

Example of longer blocks of text on Toggl home page

4. Incorporate SEO Best Practices

While you always want your website copy to serve human visitors first, you shouldn’t forget about search engines.

Quality website copy can incorporate relevant keywords while still reading naturally to human visitors.

Here’s a quick rundown of some important SEO best practices to consider when writing web copy:

Include the focus keyword in the main headline – this is especially important for your homepage, as well as any product/service pages that you want to rank in search.
Use supporting keywords in subheadings and explainer text – because you can use more words in your subheadings, they’re a great spot to include relevant supporting keywords. Or, if you can’t work your main focus keyword into the headline, you’ll at least want to get it in the subheading.
Consider separate feature/service pages – if you offer multiple distinct features/services, it might be hard to rank a single page for all of them. To optimize for this, you can consider breaking things out into separate feature pages.

For example, take a look at the WordPress.com homepage – you’ll see that, while it’s written for humans, the main headline also includes the primary focus keyword of “website builder”:

Example of a headline including primary focus keyword

5. Keep Things Short and Concise

When you’re writing long-form blog posts, you have plenty of room to make your content as long and as deep as needed.

But when you’re writing website copy, space (and reader attention) is a lot more limited.

While there are some exceptions – such as certain types of long-form sales/squeeze pages – this fact means that you’ll generally want to focus on keeping your website copy concise and to the point.

In fact, for a lot of your copy, you’ll just have a heading and subheading to make your point.

If you’re struggling to keep things short, you can start by writing a version of the content without worrying too much about length. Then, start removing unnecessary content and refining your draft until you get it to the length that you need.

A lot of times, starting longer and working backward can be easier than trying to write the perfect version in your first draft.

6. Stay Consistent Across Your Website

In order to communicate effectively and make it easy for visitors to comprehend your content, it’s important to stay consistent in all of your website copy.

You’ll want to focus on consistency in the following areas:

Personality/voice – on most sites, you want all of your website copy to sound like it’s coming from the same person.
Tone – for example, if you want to keep things formal, you’ll want all of your copy to be formal. It would be weird to switch from having a very formal homepage to suddenly using slang on other pages.
Formatting – for example, if you use sentence case for the headings on your homepage, you’ll want to continue using sentence case across your site.

If you have a larger site, you might want to create a style guide to help you achieve consistency. While this probably isn’t necessary for portfolio sites or small business brochure websites with just a few pages, it can come in handy if you’re going to be publishing dozens of pages across your site (and/or working with multiple writers).

Here are some examples of web style guides to inspire you.

7. Showcase Benefits Over Features (Most of the Time)

One mistake that a lot of people make with their website copy is focusing too much on listing and describing features rather than describing the actual benefits of those features.

To illustrate this point, let’s look at an example where you’re selling a desk chair:

Feature: Mesh back and seat
Benefit: Stay cool even during long sessions

Most people don’t care about the mesh back and seat itself. Rather, they just want the benefit of being able to sit in the chair without getting hot and sweaty.

Focusing your copy on the benefit rather than the feature makes it more persuasive and engaging. It also more clearly communicates the value of whatever you’re offering.

For a real-world example of this, check out Headspace’s homepage. Rather than highlighting a feature like “play sleep music before bed,” Headspace instead focuses on the benefit, which is to “Get more goodnights: Put your mind to bed, wake up refreshed, and make good days your new normal”.

Example of benefits over features in website copy

As is always the case, there are some exceptions to this. Sometimes features/specifications really are the most important thing. This can be especially true in technical areas where your visitors already have a deep understanding of what you offer, but they just want to verify that the technical specifics match their needs.

8. Don’t Be Afraid to Test and Experiment

No matter how well you implement these website copywriting best practices, you’re probably not going to create the perfect website copy on your first try.

That doesn’t mean you did a “bad job” – that’s just a basic fact that everyone needs to deal with.

To address this, you can run tests to tweak and optimize your website copy going forward.

If you want to keep things super simple, you can just edit the copy and see if you notice any changes in key metrics such as conversion rate, search engine rankings, and so on.

If you want to be a little more scientific, you can implement A/B testing, which lets you test two or more versions of a page against one another. You can see which variant performs better during the same time period and then utilize that version going forward.

If you made your website with WordPress, you can implement full A/B testing using a plugin like Nelio AB Testing. Just remember that you’ll need to be using at least the WordPress.com Business plan to install custom plugins like this.

How to Write Website Copy for Different Pages

Now that you have some general best practices for how to write sales copy for a website, let’s get into some specific suggestions for how to write the copy for four key pages that pretty much every website will have:

Homepage
About page
Product/service pages
Contact page

Homepage

It can be a bit tricky to make overarching recommendations for your homepage copy because the homepage can serve different purposes on different sites.

On many sites, the homepage serves as a funnel to more goal-oriented pages – e.g., a product page, sales page, contact page, etc. However, for smaller sites, your homepage might instead be the final destination for a lot of visitors.

So to start, you should really think about the goal that you want your homepage to help you achieve. Based on that goal, you can write your copy to either hook visitors and send them deeper into your site or convert them right away.

One general recommendation is to have your homepage’s headline be one singular descriptor of the benefit that your site offers. This will help people instantly understand what your site is all about, even if they have no prior experience with your brand.

For example, the homepage headline of Todoist does a great job of describing what the service does in a single sentence.

Example of a good description of a service on a website

About Page

Whether your website is for an individual or a business, your About page plays an important role in building trust and helping visitors connect with your brand.

Unlike some of the other pages on your site, the About page copy doesn’t need to be quite as laser-focused on conversions.

Instead, try to focus on accomplishing two things with your About page copy:

Establish trustworthiness – by helping people learn more about you/your company, you can give them confidence that you’re a brand that they can trust.
Share your brand identity – your About page can also be a great place to further build upon your brand identity. For example, if you want to communicate a fun/playful identity, you can really lean into those aspects on your About page.

The Moz About page does a great job of establishing its authority, especially with the subheading – “We know SEO. In fact, we wrote the blog on it.”

Example of establishing authority in a web page's subheading

Here are some more great examples of website About pages.

Product/Service Pages

If you only have a single product/service, your homepage might do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to explaining what you offer and converting visitors into customers.

But if you have multiple discrete products/services, you’ll typically use dedicated pages for each offering to convert visitors. This can also help you better optimize each page for relevant keywords in organic search.

Here’s a quick rundown of what to include on your product/service pages:

Benefits over features – as we discussed above, you’ll usually want to focus on benefits rather than just listing features on each page.
More detail – while you’ll usually want to keep things short and concise at the top of the page (with a heading and a subheading), your product/service pages are a great place to share more detailed explainers below the hero section.
CTA – add a CTA for people to purchase that product/service to drive them to action.

For example, the Jetpack plugin breaks out its different services into separate product pages, each of which is optimized for SEO. If you look at the Jetpack VaultPress Backup page, you’ll see that it manages to work in the keywords for “real-time WordPress backup plugin” while still also connecting with human visitors.

Example of optimizing for keywords in website copy

Contact Us Page

While it’s easy to overlook your contact page when it comes to writing web copy, it’s another important area to focus on.

This is especially true if you’re looking to connect with clients, as most prospective clients will reach out to you through your contact page. As such, your Contact page might be the last “make or break” copy your visitors see before making the decision on whether or not to reach out.

First off, you’ll want to keep your Contact page short and to the point. Your contact form should be the main focus of the page so that visitors can clearly see where to add their messages.

Beyond that, here are a few things to consider:

Headline – instead of using a generic “Contact” headline like a lot of sites, try to add an action-focused CTA. For example, you might use something like “Contact me today for your free quote”.
Explain next steps – include text that explains what happens after someone submits the form. For example, how long it usually takes you to respond, what the next steps are, and so on.
Testimonials/reviews – your Contact page is a great place to include some more testimonials and reviews from your happy clients/customers.

For an example of what this might look like on a portfolio website, you can check out the contact page of my own freelance writing portfolio website:

WordPress Tools and Plugins to Help You Write Website Copy

While writing website copy will always require a good bit of elbow grease, there are also some great tools that you can use to help you write better website copy in less time.

Here are four tools and plugins that can help you write better copy for your WordPress website…

Jetpack AI Assistant

Jetpack AI Assistant is an AI-powered writing assistant that you can use to help you write website copy right from the WordPress editor.

All you need to do is enter your prompt, and then Jetpack AI Assistant will generate the relevant copy for you. You also get tools to help you refine the copy, such as changing its tone or making it shorter/longer.

You can use it for very short content – e.g., a headline – as well as for longer content, even going up to full blog posts.

If you made your website with WordPress.com, you already have access to Jetpack AI Assistant – just open the WordPress editor and add the AI Assistant block where you want some help with your copy.

If you’re using a self-hosted WordPress site, you can also access Jetpack AI Assistant there by installing the Jetpack plugin.

Jetpack AI Assistant lets you get started with 20 free requests, which might be all you need for a small website copywriting project. Beyond that, paid plans start at $8.33 per month.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a well-known editing tool that can help you catch basic spelling and grammar errors, as well as just generally make your writing stronger and more concise.

You can use the Grammarly browser extension to edit copy directly in the WordPress editor. Or, you can copy and paste content into Grammarly’s separate editor if you prefer to work there.

Grammarly also supports Google Docs if you’d rather work on your copy in Google’s interface.

Grammarly has a free plan that should work fine for most copywriting projects. If you want access to more features, Grammarly Premium starts at $12 per month.

Hemingway

Hemingway is another excellent editing tool that can help you improve the clarity of your website copy. Unlike Grammarly, it doesn’t focus much on basic spelling and grammar issues. Instead, it focuses on details such as reading level, passive voice usage, word choice, and more.

Hemingway doesn’t offer a WordPress integration, though, so you’ll need to paste your copy into the Hemingway editor to get the suggestions.

Hemingway is 100% free.

Wordtune

Like Jetpack AI Assistant, Wordtune is another AI-powered tool that can help with how to write website copy.

However, whereas Jetpack AI Assistant is mostly focused on helping you create fresh website copy from scratch, Wordtune is more focused on helping you refine and improve your existing website copy.

Once you’ve written the first draft of your copy, you can use Wordtune to improve it and brainstorm new ways of writing things.

It’s free to use for up to ten rewrites per day, which should work fine for small sites. If you need more assistance, there’s an unlimited plan that starts at $14.99 per month.

Start Writing Better Website Copy Today

That wraps up our guide on how to write website copy that engages your site’s visitors and helps you achieve your website’s goals.

By following the tips and best practices in this post, you can be confident that you’re putting your best foot forward on your website.

Using website copywriting tools and assistants like Jetpack AI Assistant can also help you work more effectively and create better website copy in less time.

If you’re ready to get started, you can try Jetpack AI Assistant on your WordPress website for free.

And if you still haven’t created the website that will house your copy yet, you can check out our post on how to make a WordPress website to learn why WordPress.com makes a great option.

You can also sign up for WordPress.com for free to experience everything that it has to offer.

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How to Write Website Copy That Works (Even If You’re Not a Writer)