Words to Cut From Your Website That Make You Sound Like Everyone Else

14 September 2026·6 min read

Quick answer: Words like "solutions," "synergy," "passionate," "leading provider," and "committed to excellence" don't tell a visitor anything real about you — they're the words every business reaches for when they haven't yet figured out what makes them different. Cutting them doesn't just tidy up your copy, it forces you to replace vague claims with specific, honest ones. That specificity is what actually builds trust. 💖

Read your own homepage out loud right now. If it could describe basically any business in your industry without changing a word, that's the problem this post is about. 💖 The words themselves aren't evil — "solutions" isn't a swear word — but when a page is built almost entirely out of these generic phrases, it stops saying anything at all. Visitors skim straight past it because their brain has learned that this kind of language means "filler," and filler doesn't earn trust or clicks.

What most businesses get wrong

The mistake is copying the tone of other businesses in the same space, assuming that's what "professional" sounds like. It usually happens without anyone deciding to do it — a business starts with a template, borrows phrasing from a competitor's site that felt polished, and ends up with a page that sounds like everyone else's page. The businesses that stand out aren't necessarily the best writers; they're the ones willing to say something specific and slightly less safe than "we're passionate about delivering quality solutions."

The Generic Words Swap List

Search your website copy for these words, and each time you find one, replace it using the swap rule next to it:

"Solutions" → Name the actual thing you do. ("We build custom shelving" beats "storage solutions.")
"Passionate about" → State what you actually do differently, not how you feel about it. Feelings aren't proof.
"Leading provider of / industry-leading" → Cut entirely unless you can back it with a specific, verifiable fact. Otherwise it's just noise every competitor also claims.
"Committed to excellence / quality" → Replace with what "excellence" actually looks like in practice — a process, a guarantee, a standard you hold yourself to.
"Synergy / leverage / streamline" (corporate jargon) → Say the plain-English version. If you can't, you probably don't need the sentence.
"Innovative / cutting-edge" → Describe the specific thing that's new or different, and let the reader decide if that's innovative.
"We value our customers" → Show it with a specific policy or behaviour (response time, guarantee, how you handle issues) instead of stating it.

The one-line test for any sentence you're unsure about: "Could my closest competitor put this exact sentence on their website?" If yes, rewrite it until the answer is no.

The B2B firm's homepage full of "solutions" and "synergy": A B2B business had a homepage built almost entirely from phrases like "streamlined solutions," "leveraging synergies," and "driving results." A new visitor genuinely couldn't tell what the business did without digging into a services page. Rewriting the homepage to name the actual service, the actual problem it solved, and one specific example of how it worked cut the word count nearly in half — and feedback from new enquiries mentioned, unprompted, that the site was "actually clear" compared to competitors.

The local service business copying industry template language: A local service business had built their site from a template clearly designed for their industry, and it showed — the copy read almost identically to several competitors' sites, right down to the same stock phrases about "quality service" and "customer satisfaction." Swapping in specific, honest details — actual turnaround times, what a first appointment involved, what made their approach different — made the site instantly more distinct, without changing the layout at all.

The subscription business with a stock-template value prop: A subscription-style business had a value proposition that read like it had been generated to fit any subscription product — "flexible plans, powerful features, built for you." None of it explained what the subscription actually included or why someone would choose it over an alternative. Rewriting it around one concrete, specific benefit (what you get, how often, and what happens if you want to change or cancel) made the offer immediately easier to understand and noticeably easier to compare against competitors.

How to actually implement this

This is a genuinely fast fix compared to most website work, because you're editing existing pages rather than rebuilding them:

Copy your key pages into a document and search for the words on the swap list above.
For each hit, apply the competitor test — if a rival could say the exact same sentence, rewrite it to be specific to you.
Replace vague claims with one concrete detail each: a number, a process step, a real policy, an actual example.
Read the edited version aloud — if it still sounds like it could describe a different business in your space, keep cutting.
Get one honest, outside pair of eyes on the final version — it's hard to spot your own generic phrasing after reading it fifty times.

💡 Write the first draft the way you'd explain it to a mate at a barbecue. Most generic phrasing creeps in during the "make it sound professional" editing pass, not the first draft. Write plainly first, tidy the grammar after, and you'll naturally end up sounding like an actual person.

Don't assume formal automatically means credible — vague formal language often reads as less trustworthy than plain, specific language.
Don't cut a generic word without replacing it with something specific — the goal is substitution, not just deletion.
Don't copy competitor phrasing because it "sounds established" — if everyone uses it, it's not doing any work for you.
Don't make unverifiable superlative claims ("the best," "the leading") — these can be genuinely misleading if you can't back them up.
Don't do a one-off pass and forget about it — generic phrasing creeps back in with every new page written under time pressure.

Frequently asked questions

Isn't some of this language necessary to sound professional?

Real nuance here: a small amount of polish is fine, and not every sentence needs to be radically plain-spoken. The issue isn't formality, it's vagueness — you can be professional and specific at the same time. The words worth cutting are the ones that could apply to literally any business.

What if my industry genuinely uses these terms and customers expect them?

Fair point, and worth testing rather than assuming. Some technical or industry-standard terms are genuinely searched for by your audience, so cutting them entirely could hurt findability. Keep terms your audience actually uses and searches for; cut the ones that exist purely to sound impressive.

How do I find these words without reading every page manually?

Use your browser's find function or a basic word search across your site's text for the common offenders (solutions, passionate, leading, excellence, innovative, synergy). Blunt tool, genuinely effective — most sites are surprised how often these words repeat.

Will rewriting this way actually change my conversion rate?

It's reasonable to expect an improvement in clarity and time-on-page, but be cautious about promising a specific lift — conversion is affected by plenty of other factors too (offer, pricing, trust, page speed). Treat clearer copy as removing one obstacle, not a guaranteed fix on its own.

Keep reading 🤍

Written by

Kate, founder of Chronically Online

I help Gold Coast and Brisbane businesses grow with branding, websites and marketing that actually works.

Work with me ✦