Page with fewer than 300 words
What it is
The visible text on the page adds up to fewer than 300 words. A short page is fine when its job is short, like a contact or login page, but a page meant to rank or answer a question needs enough text to explain its subject.
Why it matters
Google says it has no preferred word count , so length alone is not the problem. The risk is a page that says too little to be useful: a product with no description, a category that is only a grid, a service page with one line. Search engines have little to match against queries, and AI assistants looking for a passage to quote are unlikely to find one. Treat the count as a prompt to review, not a target.
How Asky checks it
Asky reads the page’s raw HTML and counts the words in the <body>, after removing <script>, <style>, <noscript> and <template> contents. Menus, footers, cookie banners and text hidden by CSS count; alt text, frames and text added by JavaScript do not. A word is anything between whitespace, so text in neighbouring tags with no space between them (common in minified HTML) merges into one word, and languages written without spaces, such as Chinese or Japanese, count far fewer words. A page under 300 words is reported. Pages answering 4xx or 5xx are skipped; for a 404, this count decides whether it is reported as having content.
Reported as an opportunity with medium severity.
How to fix it
- Check what the page is for. Contact, login, thank-you and legal pages are short by nature.
- For a page meant to rank, add what a visitor needs to decide: what the product or service is, who it is for, prices or specifications, and answers to common questions. Do not pad it with filler to reach a number.
- On category and listing pages, add an introduction that explains the range and links to the key items.
- If the text is loaded by JavaScript, such as tabs, reviews or product details, put it in the HTML the server sends, so it counts and crawlers see it without rendering the page.
- If several pages cover one topic thinly, merge them into one fuller page, redirect the others to it and take their URLs out of your sitemap.
- To leave it as it is: if the page is short on purpose, or written in a language without spaces between words, mark the issue resolved.
Example
https://example.com/products/desk-lamp shows a photo, a price and one sentence: 40 words, menu and footer included. Adding a description, the specifications and answers to three common questions brings it to 420 words, and the finding clears.