How Long Is Too Long?

How long should a blog post be?

It's a question that gets asked a lot, and AI and the internet seem confident that they have the answer. Depending on which article you find or which AI you ask, you'll be told that 600 words is enough, that 1,500 words is the sweet spot, or that you should be writing 2,500 words because apparently Google likes long articles.

The question isn't really how many words an article should contain. The question is how much effort you're asking somebody to make in order to read it.

When someone opens your article, they haven't actually agreed to read it. They've clicked a link. That's all. They're going to spend a few seconds looking at the page and deciding whether what you've written is worth their time.

They see the title. They see the opening. They see how the page is laid out. They see whether the text is broken into manageable sections or whether it appears to be one enormous slab of words stretching down the screen.

That's why an article can be too long without necessarily having too many words.

The problem isn't length

People will read very long things when they want to read them.

They will spend several hours reading a novel. They'll watch a three-hour film. They'll listen to a podcast that lasts longer than some flights. They'll spend an entire evening following links down an obscure Wikipedia rabbit hole.

So it's clearly not true that people won't read something simply because it is long.

What people don't particularly enjoy is making an investment of time without knowing whether they're going to get anything worthwhile in return.

That's why I wouldn't worry too much about finding the perfect word count for a blog post. If you've made your point in 700 words, stop. Adding another 800 words because someone told you that successful articles contain 1,500 words isn't going to improve the writing.

Equally, if you've got something that genuinely needs 3,000 words, then write 3,000 words. The danger comes when you start writing to the number rather than writing to the subject.

You can usually tell when this has happened. The article starts repeating itself. An explanation that was perfectly clear the first time gets explained again in slightly different words. A related subject suddenly appears because you thought of something interesting while writing. Then that subject leads somewhere else.

Before long, the article has become a journey through everything you happened to think about while writing it.

That's when length becomes a problem. Not because the article has crossed some arbitrary word-count threshold, but because you've stopped respecting the reader's time.

An article has a visual length as well as a word length

Imagine opening a page and seeing paragraph after paragraph of dense text. There are no meaningful headings, no obvious breaks and no visual breathing space.

You haven't read a word yet, but you already have an impression of the amount of work involved.

Now imagine that the same words are arranged differently. The argument is divided into sensible sections. The paragraphs are long enough to develop an idea but not so long that they become walls of text. There is enough white space around the content to let the page breathe.

You've changed absolutely nothing about the amount of information. But you've changed how much effort the article appears to require.

That matters enormously on a screen.

A reader doesn't experience your article as "1,847 words". They experience it as a page that they have to move through. The physical appearance of that page affects whether they decide to begin.

This is why visual length matters. Two articles containing exactly the same number of words can feel completely different to read.

If all you can see is a continuous grey block, don't assume that your problem is that you've written too much. You might simply have failed to give the reader any indication that the article is made up of manageable pieces.

Paragraphs are part of the writing

This is where paragraph length becomes important.

I'm not talking about the current fashion, especially with AI-generated content, for making every sentence its own paragraph. That can be just as irritating as the enormous blocks of text it is supposedly designed to replace.

A paragraph should have some substance. It should allow an idea to develop rather than forcing the reader through a series of tiny fragments that look like somebody has forgotten how to use a return key.

At the same time, paragraphs shouldn't become walls of text simply because someone once decided that a "proper" paragraph needs to contain a certain number of sentences.

Paragraphs need boundaries. Some thoughts need more space. Some need less. Paragraphs give the reader somewhere to breathe.

Headings should tell a story

A heading isn't there because your content management system provides an H2 button or because an accessibility check requires one to pass its tests. It is there to tell the reader what comes next.

When an article is long, headings are a roadmap. A reader can scroll through them and understand the shape of the argument before deciding whether to read the whole thing.

Online, people don't always read articles from the first word to the last. They scan. They look for the part that interests them. They may read one section carefully, skim another and skip something that isn't relevant to them. That's not a sign that you've failed as a writer. It's one of the ways people use the web.

A well-structured article accommodates that behaviour. A badly structured article fights it. Meaningful headings provide a sense of where the reader is in a long article. If everything is presented as one continuous essay, the article can feel endless. By breaking your content into sections, the reader can see progress.

They're not necessarily reading fewer words. They simply have a better sense of where those words are taking them.

Don't make the reader work to discover the point

Writers often spend too long getting started because they want to establish the background before making their point. That's how we were taught to write an essay at school or university.

We explain what happened before the thing we're actually interested in, and what happened before that, and why the subject matters, and eventually, several hundred words later, we arrive at the reason the reader clicked the link in the first place.

By then, many of them have gone.

Give the reader something early. It doesn't have to be a gimmick or some ridiculous clickbait opening. It simply needs to establish why the article is worth their attention.

Once you've earned that attention, you can take your time. Long-form writing isn't the problem. Making the reader wait too long before they know why they should care is.

Sometimes you've written two articles

It is surprisingly easy to start with one idea and end up somewhere else entirely. You discover an interesting tangent, and because you've already done the research, you decide to include it. Then that tangent leads to another subject, which turns out to be interesting too. Before you know it, you've written 4,000 words and you're wondering whether you should start cutting.

The answer probably isn't to cut it out. Perhaps you've written two good articles.

Writing gets the ideas onto the page, but editing decides which ideas belong together. A tangent can be interesting and still be wrong for the article you're writing. Don't delete it just because it doesn't fit. Give it its own article.

Sometimes the best edit isn't removing 1,000 words from an article. It's recognising that those 1,000 words are the beginning of another article.

Make the page feel achievable

There is no universal ideal length for a blog post, because different articles have different jobs. A 600-word opinion piece doesn't have the same purpose as a 3,000-word technical explanation, and neither has the same requirements as a personal story or a simple announcement. Some ideas can be explained properly in a few hundred words. Others genuinely need several thousand.

The number is secondary. What matters is whether the reader can look at the article and feel that reading it is achievable.

That's why structure matters so much. Sensible paragraphs, useful headings, appropriate images and enough white space don't merely make an article look nicer. They change the perceived effort involved in reading it.

And perceived effort is what you're fighting.

You might have written 2,500 words of fascinating material. If the page makes those words look like an enormous commitment, people won't start. Conversely, you might have written exactly the same 2,500 words and made the journey through them feel natural. The words haven't changed. The reader's experience has.

So write until you've said what you need to say. Then edit ruthlessly, but don't edit simply to make the word count smaller. Remove repetition. Remove the bits that don't contribute to the argument. Move the interesting material that belongs somewhere else.

Then look at the finished article without reading it.

Look at it as a stranger would.

Does it look like something you want to read? Or does it look like something you'll get around to reading later?

Because "later" is usually writer-speak for "never".

The real question isn't "How long is too long?" It's "How much effort does this article look like it's going to require?"

Get that right, and people will read surprisingly long articles. Get it wrong, and they may never discover that the really good bit was only another two paragraphs away.