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Spring Term Starts January 18

FAQ Pages

If you write content that focuses on your audience needs, you won’t need to create FAQs.

Organization Help

If your users are asking you the same questions repeatedly, the Web Content Team can help you organize your website to incorporate and prioritize that information.

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Why FAQs Don't Work

We are often asked to post Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) content on the website. Writing FAQs can be a great way to organize your ideas, but we don't recommend using them as website content.

More Work for Readers

The structure of FAQs forces users to read every question in order to find the information they're looking for, rather than scanning through simple headings to find information at a glance.

We organize pages, paragraphs, and sentences to put the information and keywords people are looking for at the beginning. If you write headings and sentences in the form of questions (with who, what, when, where, why, and how at the beginning), your users can't scan the words as quickly.

Duplicated Content

Typically, creating a separate page for FAQs means that you're going to be duplicating content that exists elsewhere on your site. Not only does this create a maintenance problem as information and processes change, it also creates a search problem for your users.

If a user searches for a term that appears on a regular page and in an FAQ page, both will display in the list of search results. This means that you're essentially competing with your own content, making it harder for your users to search for and find what they're looking for.

If you are frequently being asked a question that is already answered on your website, this is an indication that the information is not where people expect to find it. Rather than duplicating the answer on a separate page, take a look at your website and ask yourself if the information could be rewritten or reorganized to a better place.

User Frustration

According to our website analytics, the average bounce rate of FAQ pages is 20% higher than the average page. This means that when users search for something and land on an FAQ page, they're leaving the CNM website without visiting any other pages. This is not good for user engagement, and is likely the result of the information being organized poorly.