Your Website Is Speaking A Language You Don't Speak
You're at a family dinner. Your cousin, who has politely avoided asking what you do for a living for three years, finally takes the bait: "So what does your company actually do?"
You open your mouth and read the headline from your homepage, word for word.
"We help enterprise teams own the edge with next-generation, industry-leading intelligence infrastructure."
Your cousin blinks. The table goes quiet. Someone passes the potatoes very slowly. You realize, in real time, that the sentence you just said is not a sentence anyone has ever said before — and your cousin now thinks you're in a cult.
Most B2B SaaS homepages read exactly like this. The copy is technically in English, but it's a dialect of English that only exists on the internet, spoken nowhere by no one in particular, and understood by approximately zero humans on the first read.
The Language That Only Exists Online
Call it Webspeak. It's the register of language you only encounter on B2B websites, LinkedIn bios, and the occasional award-show acceptance speech from someone's CEO. Webspeak has signature moves:
Nouns where verbs should be ("empowering innovation")
Adjective stacks no human would utter ("robust, enterprise-grade, AI-native")
Claims with zero evidence ("industry-leading," "next-generation")
Fake concreteness ("the edge," "the stack," "the future of work")
None of this survives contact with a real conversation. A single Webspeak sentence at a bar would get you cut off. A Webspeak paragraph in a cover letter would get your resume deleted. Yet somehow, founders publish this same language on the one page their actual buyers use to decide whether to take a call.
This happens through osmosis. Founders look at ten competitor sites while writing their own. They all sound like Webspeak. Founders absorb the dialect, assume that's how "a real company" talks, publish it, and then wonder why buyers aren't converting.
Why Buyers Run From Webspeak
Buyers are humans. Humans parse language unconsciously. When a human encounters a sentence no human would ever say out loud, two things happen in the first two seconds.
First, the brain flags it as noise. The brain just doesn't know where to file "own the edge," so it files it under "marketing," which is a synonym for "ignore."
Second, and worse, the buyer becomes suspicious. A company that can't explain itself in plain English is usually a company that either doesn't know what it does, or knows and doesn't want to say. Both are disqualifying for a serious buyer.
The irony is that founders think Webspeak makes them sound competent. It actually makes them sound untrustworthy. The competent-sounding website is the one that talks like a real person who happens to know what they're doing. Every other site sounds like a LinkedIn parody account.
The Voicemail Test
Try this. It takes 45 seconds.
Pretend you're leaving a voicemail for a warm prospect you've never met. You have 20 seconds before the voicemail cuts off. You need to tell them what your company does, who it's for, and why they should call you back. Record it on your phone. Don't script it.
Now play it back and compare it to your homepage headline.
The gap between those two things is the gap between how you actually describe your company to humans and how your website describes your company to nobody. The voicemail version is almost always better — clearer, more specific, more honest. It'll have real words like "we help" and "our customers use this to" and "the main thing it does is."
That voicemail is what should be on your homepage. The current homepage is what should be in the trash.
Why Nobody Fixes This
Founders don't fix their Webspeak because fixing it feels like a downgrade. The jargon-stuffed version sounds like "a real company." The plain-English version sounds like someone just... talking. Founders are afraid that if they write the way they actually speak, the site will look amateur.
That fear is backwards. Amateur sites try to sound impressive. Professional sites are clear. The sites that sound unimpressive to you — the ones that just explain what the product does and who buys it — are the ones closing deals. The sites that sound impressive are the ones buyers bounce from without scrolling.
The courage move is using small words. Big words are what everyone else hides behind.
What To Do Before Monday
Take your homepage headline. Say it out loud in a room with another adult. If either of you laughs, flinches, or asks "wait, what?" — that headline has to go. Replace it with the voicemail version. It doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be honest.
Then do the same thing for your subheadline. Then your value props. Then your CTA.
You won't finish in a single afternoon, and you don't need to. The only thing that matters is that one sentence on the page — the most important one, the one above the fold — sounds like a human said it to another human who had a dinner to get back to.
The only people who are going to give you money are humans. Humans have a very low tolerance for sentences that weren't built to come out of a mouth.
Need someone to rewrite your site in actual English? We translate Webspeak into homepages that sound like competent humans talking. anthony@edifycontent.com
