Three myths about headline writing

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. A few things about headline writing that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

“It only matters for big sites”

The headline decides whether the rest is read. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

“Our platform handles it”

Say what the reader gets. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

The short version

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about headline writing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• The headline decides whether the rest is read — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.