The Website That Explains Too Much: When Thoroughness Reads as "This Looks Complicated"

Picture a grocery store you walk past every day. One shop has merchandise piled so high it spills into the aisle, price tags layered three deep, boxes stacked so tall you can't see what's behind them. The owner is trying hard to show customers the shop has everything. The other shop has visibly less stock, but it's organized — one glance and you know exactly where everything is.

If you were in a hurry, which one would you walk into?

This isn't just a grocery-store problem. It happens to business websites every single day — and the most painful part is, it usually happens to the most conscientious owners.

Good intentions that backfire

A conscientious owner who notices their site has been live a while with nobody reaching out has one instinct: "our information must not be enough yet." So they add more — every service listed out in full, a package comparison table, all 8 steps of the workflow, after-delivery care terms, another 20 FAQs.

There's nothing wrong with this instinct. I won't argue for a second that information which genuinely answers a customer's lingering question doesn't belong on a website. We covered this before in our article on the customers who browse quietly and leave — people who haven't messaged yet are often quietly looking for an answer, and if we give it to them, they genuinely do reach out more.

But this article is about the side people usually overlook. The question isn't whether we have enough information. The question is: how does the information we already have feel to read?

Because before a customer ever reads what we carefully wrote, they've already judged our page once — and that judgment happens far faster than we think.

The brain judges a page before the eyes finish reading it

A study published through Google Research in 2012, from a team at the University of Basel in Switzerland, showed people 119 real website screenshots and gradually cut the viewing time — from half a second, down to 50 milliseconds, then 33, then 17 milliseconds.

The result: in just 17 milliseconds, people had already decided whether a page was appealing or not — and the strongest factor at that speed was visual complexity. The study's conclusion is explicit: pages with low complexity and a familiar look scored highest on attractiveness.

17 milliseconds is many times shorter than a single blink — too short to even read the words "our services." Which means a customer's first impression of our site forms before they know what we even sell.

Another study, from the 2013 CHI conference and published through the ACM Digital Library, collected ratings from 548 volunteers viewing 450 websites for half a second each, and found visual complexity and color saturation together explained roughly half the variance in how much people liked what they saw.

I want to be upfront here: both of these studies collected data abroad. I searched and couldn't find research measuring this specifically with Thai users — ETDA's annual data tracks usage hours and online activity, not the cognitive load of reading a webpage. So I won't claim these exact numbers apply to Thai audiences specifically. But they do point to a basic tendency of the human brain that's unlikely to differ much.

What's actually usable from this research isn't the millisecond figure — it's the order of events. Feeling always comes before understanding. Customers feel first, then read.

When "this is hard to read" becomes "this must be hard"

Now for the part I find most interesting — and the part that explains why good intentions can backfire on us.

Song and Schwarz, from the University of Michigan, published a study in Psychological Science in 2008 titled "If It's Hard to Read, It's Hard to Do." The method was simple: they took the exact same instructions, word for word, and printed them in two fonts — one easy to read, one hard — then asked readers how long the described task would take, how difficult it was, and how willing they were to actually do it.

People who read the hard-to-read font judged the task as taking longer, requiring more skill, and were less willing to attempt it — even though the content was word-for-word identical. The only difference was how easy it was on the eyes.

I'll be honest here: the specific minute figures often cited from this study — I tried to verify them against the original in three places (the source journal, medical research databases, and the researchers' own site) and couldn't confirm any of them; that number only ever turns up in blog posts that don't cite a method. So I'm leaving those numbers out of this article and sticking to what the journal's own abstract actually supports, which you can click through and read yourself.

What this research tells business owners is that our brains can't tell the difference between "this is hard to read" and "this is hard." The friction of reading gets automatically converted into a feeling about the product or service itself — and the reader doesn't even realize it's happening.

In business terms: a page so packed it's exhausting to read doesn't make customers think "wow, they're really thorough," the way we hope. It makes them think "this looks like a hassle, I'll come back to it later" — which in practice means never.

And that's why a service that's actually simple to use ends up being harder to sell than it should be — because the page makes it look complicated, even though the service itself isn't.

Why business owners rarely spot this themselves

If the problem is this obvious, why don't we see it from the start?

Because we're too close to our own product. Owners know their service so well that everything on it feels important. Every piece of information on the page has a reason in our head — because a real customer once actually asked about it.

The problem is, the customer who asked that question was already halfway through a conversation with us. Someone who's just landed on the page is still at "what is this, and how does it relate to my problem?" We end up putting the answers meant for the first group in front of the second.

Another common cause is off-the-shelf website templates. When a template has 12 blank fields to fill in, leaving any of them empty feels unfinished — so we scramble to fill every field, even when the business really only needed 5. We've written before about the limits of template-based websites versus custom-built ones in our article on where the line sits between a website that looks finished and one that can actually run a business.

But wait — more information isn't always bad

If I stopped the article here, I'd be selling you an oversimplified idea. There's research that pushes back on this too, and I think you should see it.

Many people have heard of Iyengar and Lepper's famous jam study from 2000, run at a supermarket in California. The abstract published by Columbia Business School found people bought more when offered 6 choices than when offered 24 or 30. That sounds like it supports this article perfectly.

But by 2010, a research team had gathered 50 studies on this exact question — 63 experimental conditions, 5,036 participants combined — published in the Journal of Consumer Research and freely readable in full. The average effect size was close to zero. Some studies found a clear effect, some found none at all, and in some cases more choices actually made deciding easier.

I'm including this even though it argues against my own article's premise, because it points us toward a more accurate answer.

The problem was never "quantity" on its own. If sheer quantity were the problem, no 80-item Thai street-food menu would ever sell — but they all do, because the menu is grouped well: stir-fried, fried, curries, boiled, spicy salads. You open it and instantly know where to look, without reading all 80 lines.

The real problem is information that's hard to compare once it's plentiful — the kind where the customer has to sit there and work out for themselves what matters more, what applies to them, what they can skip. That's the burden we hand them, and most people choose not to carry it.

4 signs your website is carrying more than it should

Before we get to fixes, check whether your site shows any of these signs.

Sign 1: every section carries equal weight. Scroll through the homepage and every block is the same size, the same color, the same font size. When nothing stands out, the eye doesn't know where to stop — so it doesn't stop at all.

Sign 2: it explains how something works before explaining why it matters. The page opens with process, technology, or materials, while someone who's just arrived doesn't yet know what problem this even solves for them. That information has real value — but only to someone who's already interested.

Sign 3: conditions and exceptions sit above the fold. Things like which areas are served, what jobs aren't accepted, when extra charges apply. These need to exist somewhere — but if they appear before the customer even wants the thing, they act as a filter turning people away, not information supporting a decision.

Sign 4: the contact button is nowhere to be found on one screen. If a customer has to scroll up and down hunting for how to reach you, it means we've given them more information than we've given them a way out.

If your site shows all four, don't panic — most sites we've reviewed have at least two, and none of the four requires rebuilding the site from scratch to fix.

3 tests you can run on your own site today

No agency, no tools required. Open your own site and try these, one at a time.

Test 1: squint. Open the homepage on your phone and squint until the text blurs past reading. What still reads as the clearest shape should be the headline and the contact button. If squinting just gives you a flat gray blur across the whole screen, everything is carrying equal weight — which visually means nothing is important at all. This test lines up exactly with what the visual-complexity research found: what you see while squinting is what a customer's brain sees in that first 17 milliseconds.

Test 2: five seconds, then ask. Find someone who doesn't know your business. Let them look at the homepage for 5 seconds, then close it, and ask two questions: "What do we sell?" and "What do I do next if I'm interested?" If they can't answer either one, the problem probably isn't that they weren't paying attention — it's that the page is trying to say too many things at once. This test is brutal but the most honest one, and it takes under a minute.

Test 3: for each section, ask "would anyone not buy if this were gone?" Go block by block and ask yourself: if I deleted this whole section, would a single customer fail to decide because they didn't know this? If you can't answer within 2 seconds, that section is there because we wanted to say it — not because they wanted to know it.

Sections that fail this test don't need to be deleted — this is where people usually get it wrong. Move it to the bottom of the page, put it on a separate page, or tuck it behind an expandable heading. All the information stays, word for word; people who want it can still find it. People who haven't asked yet just don't have to see it in the first second.

So what's the right order?

The rule that works for almost any business: order things by the sequence of questions in the customer's head, not by the order of our own pride.

The very first layer answers what this is and how it helps them — one sentence a reader instantly recognizes as relevant to them. This layer should be readable before they even scroll.

The second layer is proof we can actually deliver — work similar to theirs, past clients, real photos of finished jobs. This layer's job is to lower the worry of hiring someone who can't actually do it.

The third layer is detail that answers specific concerns — the process, the timeline, what they get. Anyone who scrolls this far is already interested; they're ready to read more.

The last layer is fine print and exceptions — keep these behind an expandable heading or a separate page, so the people who genuinely need them can go find them.

If you want to check whether your site has the basic components it should before worrying about order, we broke that down separately in our article on the components every business website needs — pair it with this one. That one covers what should be there; this one covers how to order it.

Why business owners choose TumWebSME to build their site

By now most readers can probably see where the problem lives. But when it comes to actually doing it, everyone gets stuck at the same question: "so what goes where?"

Deciding what goes up top, what goes further down, what should be hidden — that's a different skill from making something look pretty. It's about understanding what actually drives that specific business's customers to decide, which the business owner knows better than anyone alive, but usually can't see from the inside, for the exact reasons above.

Our team has worked continuously with SME owners, and it's the same team that has built for large organizations before. We don't start by asking how many pages you want. We start by sitting down and asking what your customers usually ask first, what makes them hesitate, and what tips the scale when they finally decide to buy — then we take those answers and use them to order the page.

The site we deliver is written fresh for your specific business, instead of an off-the-shelf theme you have to cram content into to fill its fixed slots — because, as covered above, a rigid template is one of the reasons so many sites end up stuffed with more than they need.

If you're weighing how to get started, our summary of what business owners should know before building a website is worth reading alongside this one.

And if the site you already have still works, you don't necessarily need to rebuild it from scratch. Plenty of cases just needed reordering, and hiding sections that don't need to show yet — and the difference was already visible. Message us and tell us about it first; we'll tell you honestly whether it needs adjusting or rebuilding. We don't push a rebuild on every case.

Thoroughness isn't the enemy of sales. Thoroughness that makes the customer do their own processing — that's the enemy.

The research tells us the brain judges a page within a split second based on visual complexity, and the feeling of "this is hard to read" gets translated into "this is a hassle." At the same time, another body of research warns us that simply cutting information isn't an automatic fix either.

What actually works is ordering: put decision-relevant information first, follow it with proof, then practical detail, and let fine print wait for the people who genuinely want to dig for it.

Try opening your own site and squinting at it once. It takes under a minute, and it usually tells you more than you'd expect.

Want us to take a look at your site?

Send us your link. We'll tell you honestly where customers are likely to trip up, and what to fix first. The first consultation is free.

See all our services and packages at the TumWebSME packages page.

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