Why Your WordPress Site Should Focus More on Content Than Design.

Why your WordPress content matters more than the design.

Everyone needs a website that looks professional and appropriate, but it’s far too easy to think that getting the design right is going to win you new business – it’s not: potential customers make their mind up about your design in 300ms.

• Copy first, design later.
• Design doesn’t convert. Content does.
• Stop writing to fit the design.
• Design will not save you.
• A word about SEO.

Copy first, design later.

I still get this: Can we see the designs first? Then we’ll write the content.

No. Absolutely not. Flip it. Your content should drive the design, not the other way around.

The idea that you need a layout before you know what you’re saying is entirely backwards.

You wouldn’t ask an architect to design a house before deciding how many bedrooms you need.

You don’t hire a chef to cook dinner and then tell them what ingredients you wish you’d brought.

It’s the same with websites.

If you don’t know what you want to say, what exactly is the designer supposed to design?

Design doesn’t convert. Content does.

Yes, your website needs to look credible.

It should reflect your brand and be clean, clear and easy to use.

But let’s not kid ourselves – design is what people judge in the first half-second. It’s your content that gets them to act.

If Amazon had prioritised design over content and function, it’d have gone bust in the late 90s.

No animations. No big images. Just a truckload of information people can trust.

It’s not about pop. It’s about purpose.

Stop writing to fit the design.

This happens when people start with mockups and then try to jam in their message later.

And what you end up with is filler. Lazy copy. Clichés.

Stuff that sounds polished but doesn’t actually say anything useful.

You don’t write a book based on the number of pages.

You don’t write a headline to match the size of the banner someone sketched up.

Write what needs to be said. Then shape the layout around that.

Design will not save you.

No one ever said: “I was about to leave the site, but then I saw how beautifully the testimonial section faded in – so I stayed.”

They leave because your site doesn’t answer their questions.

They bounce because you don’t explain what you do, why it matters, or how to take the next step.

The content is what gives the design a job to do.

Without it, design is just cake decoration.

A word about SEO.

Google doesn’t rank your gradients.

It doesn’t care how “clean” your hero banner looks or whether your fonts are from the latest trend list.

It cares about whether your page is helpful.

Whether it answers the user’s question. Whether it’s clear, informative and trustworthy.

That all comes from content – structured, thoughtful and written with your audience in mind.

Design helps deliver it. But content is the reason your site exists in the first place.

I’ve been designing stuff for over 25 years: here’s a true story.

My main business, over at Toast, generates all its revenue from organic search – we have a particular type of client that we work best with.

Our clients are those individuals who require a designer to deliver the job efficiently – no theatrics or drama, just solid, creative B2B work completed within a fair timeframe and at a reasonable cost.

Having designed the Toast website to cater to these types of clients, I felt pressure that our website was not creative enough or didn’t resemble other design agency websites.

So to prove a point, I let the designers design a new site.

They redesigned the website to how they felt it should look, and guess what happened?

We didn’t get a single new business enquiry for six months.

Before letting the business tank, I reverted to the old site (I had kept a copy), and the leads started to flow in again.

This was not a case where the design was wrong per se, nor was it a drop in ranking content; it was simply a case where the creatives felt that the design of the site was the most critical aspect.

As part of the redesign, a lot of the content was removed to make it look more ‘designery’ – the essential stuff – the words that converted the visitors had gone.

The site copy, which had been written to address our specific target audience, had been removed, leaving visitors to form their own opinions based solely on design, and conversions tanked.

The lesson here, which I try to convey to all new clients (some successfully, others not), is that you can design your sitei how every you want, but if you think the design is going to either win you more business or lose it for you, think again, it’s what you say that counts, providing it’s wrapped up in something that can be seen as professional and approriate in one-third of a second.