You can have the right services, the right information and a well-designed website, yet still leave people struggling to understand what you’re offering.

Maybe your service descriptions make sense to your team but don’t mean much to someone encountering them for the first time. Maybe your headings sound good but don’t tell visitors what they’ll find on the page. Or maybe the information is there, but people have to work too hard to make sense of it.

These aren’t always obvious problems. The content might be accurate, the writing might be polished, and everyone involved in reviewing it might agree that it reads well.

But there’s a difference between writing that makes sense to the people who know your organization and content that helps someone unfamiliar with it understand what they need to know.

Your website isn’t just about communicating what your organization does. It’s helping people decide what that information means for them.

That distinction has implications for how we approach website content, from the language we use to the way information is organized and presented.

Your audience doesn’t know what you know

When you’re immersed in an organization, its language becomes second nature. You understand the services, the processes, the terminology and the distinctions that might seem insignificant to someone on the outside.

Your audience doesn’t necessarily share that context.

A service name might reflect exactly how your organization categorizes its work, but not how a prospective customer would describe what they’re looking for. A page might explain a process accurately without making it clear why someone should care. A heading might be creative and memorable without helping visitors decide whether they’re in the right place.

The challenge isn’t necessarily that the writing is bad. It’s that the content is written from a perspective the audience may not share.

This is one reason website content benefits from the same kind of thinking that goes into UX and information architecture. We need to understand what people are trying to accomplish, what they need to know and how they’ll make sense of the information we give them.

It’s also why asking an organization to review its own website can only tell us so much. Internal reviewers bring valuable knowledge, but that familiarity can make it difficult to spot assumptions that aren’t obvious to everyone else.

The question isn’t just whether the information is accurate or whether the wording sounds right. It’s whether someone arriving with a particular need can understand what they’re looking at and what it means for them.

Readability scores only tell part of the story

If you’ve worked with website content, you’ve probably encountered readability scores. Tools such as Yoast and Hemmingway Editor assess aspects of writing, including sentence length and word complexity, to estimate how difficult your content may be to read.

These tools can be useful. They can flag long sentences, dense paragraphs and language that might benefit from a closer look. They also give content teams something concrete to check during an editorial review.

But a score isn’t a measure of whether someone actually understands what they’ve read.

Imagine rewriting a service description to use shorter sentences and simpler words. The readability score improves, but the description still doesn’t explain who the service is for or how it differs from other options. The writing may be easier to read without giving the reader any more confidence about what to do next.

Research published in the December 2024 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine offers an interesting example. In a randomized trial involving 2,235 adults in Australia, researchers compared health information written at grade 8, 10, 12 and 14 reading levels. They found no evidence that lowering the reading level alone improved participants’ knowledge or other measured outcomes.

The study focused on health information, so we shouldn’t assume its findings apply in exactly the same way to every website. But it raises a useful question for anyone working with content: what are we actually improving when we simplify the words?

A lower readability score can be a worthwhile goal, but it shouldn’t become the goal. If the content still assumes too much knowledge, leaves important questions unanswered or makes people piece together information from different pages, we’ve only addressed part of the problem.

Think about what people need to understand

People don’t arrive at a website with identical reading skills, background knowledge or familiarity with a subject. That matters when we’re deciding how to explain a service, present important information or guide someone through a decision.

The OECD’s 2024 Survey of Adult Skills found that 19% of Canadian adults aged 16 to 65 scored at Level 1 or below in literacy. At Level 1, adults can understand short texts and organized lists when information is clearly indicated, find specific information and identify relevant links. Those below Level 1 can, at most, understand short, simple sentences.

These proficiency levels aren’t school grade levels, and the findings don’t tell us how every person will use a website. However, they do provide useful context for why we shouldn’t assume everyone will navigate complex written information in the same way.

This isn’t about talking down to people or stripping all the details out of your content. Some subjects require precise terminology, and some decisions require more explanation, not less.

It’s about making the information as easy to understand as the subject allows.

Sometimes that means replacing an unfamiliar term. Sometimes it means explaining the term rather than removing it. It might mean breaking a complicated process into steps, making a distinction between two services more explicit, or moving an important explanation closer to where someone needs it.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines address several of these considerations, including reading level, unusual words, descriptive headings and clear instructions. These are accessibility considerations, but they also help us think more carefully about how people encounter and use information.

The right approach depends on what the audience needs to understand and what the content is asking them to do. That’s why a readability score is most useful when it’s part of a broader review, rather than a pass-or-fail test for the writing.

The words and the structure need to work together

Sometimes the problem isn’t the wording. It’s how the information works together.

When content isn’t working, it’s tempting to start rewriting. Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. But sometimes the problem is bigger than the wording.

Consider a website with several services that sound similar to someone unfamiliar with the organization. You could refine each description, but if the differences between those services still aren’t clear, the reader may be no closer to deciding which one is relevant.

The issue might be how the services are explained. It might also be how they’re grouped, how the pages relate to one another or whether the website reflects the way people think about their needs.

The same applies when someone can’t find an answer. A more descriptive heading might help. But if the information is buried on the wrong page or competing with several unrelated topics, changing the heading won’t solve the underlying problem.

This is where content strategy and information architecture become important. They help us look beyond individual sentences to consider the purpose of each page, the relationships between pieces of information and the path someone needs to follow.

It’s also why content shouldn’t be treated as something to finish once the website’s structure and design are settled. The words influence the structure, and the structure influences how people understand the words.

Looking at both together gives us a much better chance of addressing the actual problem, rather than polishing content that still isn’t helping people.

How to tell whether your content is working

You don’t need to assess every page on your website at once. Start with a few that matter to your audience, such as service pages, key information pages or content that helps people decide what to do next.

Rather than looking only for sentences to improve, consider the experience someone has as they try to understand the page.

• Can they tell what the page is about? The heading and opening should help people recognize whether they’ve found relevant information.
• Does the language make sense to them? Look for internal terminology, unexplained concepts and assumptions about what the reader already knows.
• Can they understand their options? If you’re describing several services or processes, are the differences clear enough to help someone decide?
• Is the information where they expect to find it? Consider whether the page structure and navigation reflect how people look for answers.
• Do they know what to do next? Check whether the content answers the questions someone needs resolved before moving forward.

Readability tools can help you identify places to investigate. But it’s worth going a step further: read the page as someone unfamiliar with your organization, check whether the headings communicate meaning on their own, and ask someone outside the project what they take away from the content.

If you have access to user research or website analytics, use that evidence to help prioritize what to review. Questions from customers, patterns in site searches and points where people struggle to complete a task can all give you clues about where the experience may need attention.

You may find that a few wording changes are enough. You may find that a page needs to be reorganized, or that the website isn’t answering an important question at all.

The point is to understand what people need before deciding what to change.

Give people a clearer way forward

The words on your website influence how people understand your organization, assess their options and decide what to do next. That makes content an important part of the website experience, not simply something to polish before launch.

Readability scores can help identify potential issues, but they don’t tell the whole story. The more useful question is whether your audience can find the information they need, understand what it means and use it to make a decision.

Answering that question takes more than good writing. It takes an understanding of your audience, a clear purpose for your content and thoughtful decisions about how information is organized and presented.

If your website has the information people need but isn’t helping them make sense of it, a closer look at the content and the experience around it can help you identify where to focus.

That’s where a more strategic approach to your website can make a difference.

Need a fresh perspective on your website?

Whether you’re trying to make your content clearer, improve how people navigate your website or work through a bigger strategic challenge, let’s talk about what you need and how I can help.