How to Make Your Website Easy to Read (So Customers and AI Actually Use It)

Read this with AI

Read with ChatGPT Read with Claude Ask Gemini

Short answer: Make your website easier to read by front-loading the answer in the first sentence, keeping paragraphs to two or three sentences, swapping jargon for plain words, and breaking pages up with subheadings and bullet lists. Set body text to at least 16 pixels with dark-on-light contrast. The same formatting helps customers skim and AI engines quote you.

This is not about what to write. It is about making what you already wrote easy to read. Your words might be fine. The problem is that they arrive as one gray block, and nobody gets to them.

Two audiences decide your traffic, and both of them skim. Real customers scan for the one answer they came for. AI answer engines pull the passages they can cleanly parse. The Nielsen Norman Group measured how much of a page people actually read and found that on an average visit, users have time to read at most 28% of the words, and 20% is the more likely figure. They scan. They do not read. Formatting is the low-effort win most owners skip, because it needs no new content, just a plainer version of what is already there. For the broader list of site fixes around this one, see our small business website tips; this piece is only about how the page reads.

Kari Barton, who works in web services at Liberty University, put the problem plainly in a post about walls of text. She wrote that a giant wall of copy fails because it is "too daunting" and lacks the "information scent" that tells a reader they are on the right track. Her point is honest and worth keeping in mind: you and I are web users too, so we already know a large block of text is not inviting to read. We just forget it the moment we write our own page.

We will use one running example the whole way down: a small-business "About" page written as a single dense paragraph, and the scannable rewrite of the same words. Same content. Different shape. Here are the moves, in order.

Front-load the answer in the first sentence

Put the payoff first. Not in the third paragraph, not after a warm-up about your history and values. The first sentence should say the thing the reader came to find out.

Take the wall-of-text "About" page. The original opens with "Founded in 2009 by two friends who shared a passion for quality..." The reader wanted to know what you do and whether you cover their area. They have to wade through four sentences to find it. The rewrite opens with "We install and repair flat roofs across Leeds and Bradford, usually within two days of your call." Now the first line answers the question.

This matters more the longer the page. The same Nielsen Norman research found that on pages with a huge word count, users read only about 10% of the text, and they read half the information only on pages of 111 words or less. The more you pile on, the less gets read. So the first sentence is often the only one you can count on. Spend it on the answer. This is the same instinct behind a good meta description: lead with what the reader gets, not with your backstory.

Keep paragraphs to two or three sentences

One idea per paragraph. Two or three sentences, then a line break. A paragraph that runs seven sentences is a wall, and a wall is what people skip.

The dense "About" page has one 90-word paragraph covering the founders, the mission, the service area, and the guarantee. A skimming reader sees a slab and moves on. Break it into four short paragraphs, one idea each, and the eye has a place to land on every point. The words did not change. The shape did.

Short sentences do the same work inside the paragraph. One idea per sentence. If a sentence has two commas and an "and" holding three thoughts together, split it. Read your draft out loud, and every place you run out of breath is a place to add a period.

Swap jargon for plain words

Write the way you talk to a customer at the counter, not the way a brochure sounds. "Bespoke fenestration solutions" is a window. "We utilize industry-leading methodologies" means nothing. Plain words reach more people and read faster.

They also reach a much wider audience than most owners assume. An analysis by the APM Research Lab, using U.S. Department of Education data, found that about 130 million U.S. adults, roughly half of Americans aged 16 to 74, have low literacy skills, and more than one in five read at or below the lowest measured level. Plain, simple wording is not dumbing down. It is the difference between a page half your audience can use and a page they bounce off.

There is a practical target for this. On the Flesch Reading Ease scale, a score of 60 to 69 is rated "standard" plain English that high-school students read comfortably, and tools like Yoast steer general web content toward staying in that easy-to-read band. You do not have to memorize the math. Shorter words and shorter sentences move the score up on their own. For the deeper craft of what those plain words should actually say and sell, that is a separate skill covered in how to write website copy.

Break the page up with subheadings and bullet lists

Give scanners handrails. Subheadings let a reader jump to the part they want. Bullet lists turn a buried run of items into something the eye catches in one pass.

On the "About" page, the guarantee is one clause inside a long sentence: "...and we back everything with a workmanship warranty, free callouts within the first year, and a fixed quote with no surprises on the final bill." Nobody scanning will catch all three. Pull them out:

A workmanship warranty on every job
Free callouts in the first year
A fixed quote, with no surprise on the final bill

Now the three promises are impossible to miss. Subheadings work the same way at the page level. Each one should say something, not just label a zone. "Roof repairs, done in two days" beats "Our Services." A reader who scans only your subheadings should still come away knowing what you do.

This is also the single move that pays off twice, and it is worth being deliberate about it. The clear structure that helps a human skim is the exact structure a search engine reads to pull a featured snippet. One change, two audiences served.

Make the text bigger, easier on the eyes, and higher contrast

Set body text to at least 16 pixels. Give lines room to breathe with generous line height, around 1.5. Keep dark text on a light background. Small, cramped, low-contrast type is the quiet reason people give up before they read a word.

Contrast has an actual standard, not just a preference. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines require a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text against its background, and 3 to 1 for large text. That is why light-gray body text on a white background is a mistake, even when it looks tasteful in the design mockup. If a customer has to lean in to read your prices, many of them will not.

In the work of rebuilding pages for owner-run businesses, the most common problem we see is not bad writing. It is good writing set in pale 13-pixel type inside one unbroken block, so nobody ever reaches it. Owners are usually surprised, because on their own laptop, sitting close, it looked fine. On a customer's phone, in daylight, it disappears. The fix is almost never new words. It is bigger type, real spacing, and stronger contrast.

Test your readability in five minutes

You do not need a tool to catch most of this. Three quick checks find the worst offenders.

The squint test. Blur your eyes at the page. If you see one solid gray mass, you have a wall. If you see distinct chunks, headings, and lists, you have structure.
The read-aloud test. Read a paragraph out loud. Every spot you stumble or run out of air is a sentence to shorten.
A free readability checker. Paste your text into a Flesch Reading Ease checker and aim for that 60 to 69 band. Yoast and similar tools score it as you write.

Do this on your homepage and your top service page first, since those carry the most traffic. Five minutes each. The squint test alone will catch the walls, and the walls are what cost you the most.

Why readable pages get quoted by AI

Here is the second payoff, spelled out. The same formatting that helps a skimming customer helps an AI answer engine lift your text into its answer.

AI Overviews and assistants like ChatGPT do not read your page the way you hoped a careful visitor would. They parse it. A clean, self-contained answer under a clear subheading is easy to extract and quote. A brilliant point buried in the middle of a 90-word paragraph is not, so it stays invisible, no matter how good it is. Front-loaded answers, short paragraphs, plain words, and clear headings are the format these systems can actually use. If you want the fuller picture, we cover it in how AI assistants choose their sources.

So readability is not a nicety you get to after the "real" SEO. For the two audiences that decide your traffic, it is the real SEO. Clean structure is table stakes on the page itself, which is why it sits right alongside the on-page SEO basics. Format your page for a skimmer, and you have formatted it for the machine too.

Frequently asked questions

How long should paragraphs be on a website?

Two or three sentences, with one idea each. Longer than that and skimming readers skip the block entirely. If a paragraph is covering two different points, split it into two, even if both are short.

What font size should website body text be?

At least 16 pixels for body text, with line height around 1.5 for breathing room. Keep dark text on a light background so it clears the WCAG contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for normal text. Anything smaller or paler makes people work to read your prices, and many will not bother.

Does readability actually affect SEO and AI search?

Yes, in two ways at once. Readable formatting keeps human visitors on the page long enough to act, and the same clean structure lets AI answer engines extract and quote your text. Front-loaded answers under clear subheadings are the format both a skimming customer and an AI Overview can use.

How do I check if my writing is easy to read?

Use the squint test for structure, read a paragraph out loud to catch long sentences, and paste your text into a free Flesch Reading Ease checker. Aim for a score of 60 to 69, the "standard" plain-English band that high-school readers handle comfortably.

Readability is the rare fix that costs you nothing new to write and pays off with two audiences at once. Shorten the paragraphs, plain up the words, add the headings and lists, and bump the type, and the page you already have starts working for the customers who skim and the AI engines that quote. Fonzy handles this kind of on-page cleanup automatically, so the answer lands first and the walls come down without you touching the code.

Sources

Roald

Founder Fonzy. Obsessed with scaling organic traffic. Writing about the intersection of SEO, AI, and product growth.