How Do You Write a Good FAQ Page for Your Website?

A good FAQ page answers the questions your customers are already asking, in the words they actually use, with a straight answer in the first two sentences. That is the whole trick. The pages that fail are the ones written by a business guessing at what people want to know, padded with marketing lines, and finished off with “contact us to find out more”. The pages that work are built from your own inbox and phone calls, and they give a real answer without making anyone email you first.

Start with the questions you already get

You do not need to invent anything. Spend twenty minutes going through your last fifty enquiries, whether they came by email, phone, Facebook message or the counter. Write down every question that came up more than once. That list is your FAQ page.

If you sell online, add the questions people ask just before they buy, because those are the ones costing you sales. How long does delivery take to regional areas? Do you ship overseas? What happens if it arrives damaged? Is the price in Australian dollars and does it include GST? Every one of those left unanswered is a reason for someone to close the tab.

Write the question the way a customer would say it

This matters more than people expect. “What is your dispatch lead time?” is how your warehouse talks. “How long until my order is posted?” is how your customer talks, and it is closer to what they type into Google. Using the customer’s phrasing makes the page easier to scan and more likely to be found in the first place.

Keep questions short and make them headings, so someone skimming on a phone can run their eye down the page and stop at the one that matters to them.

Answer it properly, and answer it first

Lead with the answer, then explain. “Yes, we deliver Australia wide. Orders under two kilograms go by Australia Post and usually arrive in three to five business days, longer for remote areas.” That is more useful than three sentences of build-up before you get to the point.

Two or three sentences is usually plenty. If an answer keeps growing, that is a sign the topic deserves its own page, and the FAQ entry should give the short version and link across to it. This is the same clear writing that makes the rest of your site work, and it is worth applying everywhere, not just here.

Group them once you have more than about ten

A short FAQ page can be one plain list. Once you pass ten or so questions, group them under simple subheadings such as Ordering, Delivery, Returns and Payment. Put the most common questions at the top of each group rather than in the order you happened to think of them.

Accordions that hide answers behind a click look tidy, but they add a step for every visitor. If you use them, make sure the text is still in the page code rather than loaded in later, or search engines may never see it. A well built WordPress website should handle this properly out of the box.

Add FAQ schema so machines can read it too

FAQ schema is a small piece of structured data that tells Google, and increasingly tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, that this block of text is a question and this block is its answer. It does not change how the page looks to a human. It just makes the content much easier for a machine to quote correctly.

This is one of the quieter wins in AI search. When an assistant answers “does that gallery ship to Perth”, it needs a clear, attributable answer somewhere on the web. A properly marked up FAQ page is exactly that. Most SEO plugins can add the markup for you, or a developer can add it directly, which is the kind of tidy back-end work our sister studio Smart Coding handles on custom builds.

What to leave off

• Questions nobody has ever asked, written purely to squeeze in a keyword.
• Answers that say “please contact us” when you could simply give the number.
• Your whole returns policy or privacy policy. Summarise and link to the full page.
• Anything that will be out of date in a month, such as current stock or a sale price.
• Sales copy. An FAQ page is for reassurance, not persuasion.

Check it twice a year

An FAQ page goes stale quietly. Prices change, couriers change, policies change, and the page sits there telling people something that stopped being true eighteen months ago. Put a reminder in the calendar for every six months, read it top to bottom, and while you are there add any new question that has started coming up. It is a ten minute job that saves you answering the same email over and over.

If you want more plain-English guides like this one, have a look through our Insights.

Need a hand with your website content?

We help Australian businesses build websites that answer the right questions in the right places. If your FAQ page needs a rewrite, or your site needs a bigger tidy up, give us a call on 02 9834 4119 or get in touch and we will talk it through.