What winners actually say
Words
The headline, the page title and the button labels from 283 award-winning home pages, read straight off the pages themselves. How long a winning headline runs, what it claims, whether it speaks to the reader at all — and the 78% that never do.
Read them cold
Twelve First Screens, Word for Word
Twelve headlines as they were written, best-scoring first. Read together they show what the field has settled on: about 5 words, more often a label than a sentence, and in four cases out of five containing no you and no we anywhere. What a winning first screen mostly does is name the thing — not make a promise to whoever is reading it.
Every line links to that winner's record. Taken from the served HTML, so what you are reading is what a crawler reads.
The shape of it
Measured, Not Remembered
The oldest instruction in writing for the web is to address the reader. 78% of these headlines never do — no you, no your, no we, no our. The rest of the figures say what a winning first screen ships instead: a headline of 5 words, a page title using about half the room a search result gives it, and, for 45% of them, no headline at all until the JavaScript has run.
Hover any figure for what it counts. Word choice is measured on the 238 headlines declaring English only; length on any Latin-script headline. Read by build/words.mjs, which caches per site.
Six ways to open
The Move, and Who Makes It
Each way of starting carries how often a studio portfolio uses it beside how often client work does. The gap between those two columns is the useful part: it is the same writers doing a different job, and what separates them most is whether the company is allowed to be the subject of its own headline.
The fragment
44% of portfolios vs 55% of client work
Five words or fewer, making no claim. A name for the thing, set large.
The default. Reads as confidence when the picture behind it is strong, and as nothing at all when it is not.
The flat statement
25% of portfolios vs 28% of client work
A whole sentence, closed with a full stop. Not a slogan — a claim.
Punctuation is a decision. A full stop says this is an assertion you could argue with.
The name
19% of portfolios vs 16% of client work
Says who is speaking, inside the headline itself.
Cheap if the name is known and a wasted first screen if it is not.
Talking to you
9% of portfolios vs 14% of client work
Uses you or your. The reader is in the sentence.
The move most often advised and, on this evidence, among the least used.
Talking about us
22% of portfolios vs 6% of client work
Uses we or our. The company is the subject.
The one place where a portfolio and a client site genuinely part company.
The command
5% of portfolios vs 12% of client work
Opens on a verb and tells you to do something. "Start for free." "Meet the new one."
The shortest possible distance between a headline and a click, which is also why it is the easiest one to write badly.
One headline can make several of these moves, so the rates overlap rather than divide up a hundred. 64 portfolios against 174 client sites, English only.
Saying who you are
One Line, About Yourself
The hardest headline anyone writes is their own. These are studio and designer portfolios — the same people who write the client sites above, with nobody to approve the copy and no product to describe.
Portfolios are held apart from every other figure on this site so that self-promotion cannot tilt the trend numbers. This page and Portfolios are the only two that read them.
The shortest copy on the page
What the Buttons Are Asked to Say
Every label on a button, or on a link dressed as one, across 287 English-language winners — consent banners, players, carts and language switchers taken out, so what is left is the site's own writing.
There is no shared vocabulary. 1149 distinct labels came off 287 sites and the commonest appears on 20 of them, about 7%. Nothing on this list is a convention, which means button wording is a decision every time rather than a default anyone will recognise on arrival.
The most emphasised words on a winning site are also, mostly, places to go rather than things to do — contact, about, subscribe. The asks start further down the list, and they get more specific as they go.
A page with fourteen "learn more" buttons contributes one. Read from the served HTML, so anything a script inserts later is not counted.
When the words are the picture
Set Large Enough to Be the Design
At this size a headline stops being copy and becomes the composition. The words carry the layout, so the sentence has to survive being read at a glance and from across a room — a different test from the one a paragraph has to pass, and the reason a line that reads well in a document can collapse at 200 pixels tall.
Couro Azul8.02
2°C EARTH7.92
Design Canada7.84
The Line Studio7.76
Flow Party7.72
Bennett & Clive7.71
Winners tagged typography — where the words are doing the work a picture usually does.
Being written about now
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Live from 4 feeds about the words rather than the picture: landing-page copy, content design, and the trade arguing with itself about how to write.
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Copyhackers and NN/g publish no pictures with their feeds. They are the standing authorities on web copy and on microcopy respectively, so they are listed here rather than left out.