Your website copy sounds like everyone else's because you wrote it the way everyone else does, describing your business instead of talking to the person reading it. Copy that sells does one plain thing. It tells a stranger what you do, who it is for, and why you, in the first few seconds, in the words they would actually say out loud. Get that right and the rest is mostly tidying.
Here is the part most people skip. Good copy starts before you write a single line, with knowing exactly who you are talking to and what they are quietly weighing you up against. Skip that and you end up writing for nobody in particular, which is precisely why it reads like nobody in particular wrote it.
Why does my homepage sound like every other website?
Because it opens the way every other website opens. "Welcome to our site." "We are a family-owned business passionate about quality and customer service." Someone in Mount Eden reading that has learned nothing, because it describes a mood, not a service. Try the five second test on your own homepage. Show it to a person who has never heard of you, give them five seconds, then take it away and ask three things. What does this business do. Who is it for. Why would you pick them over the next tab. If they cannot answer all three, the copy is not working, however nice the site looks.
The trap is that your copy feels fine to you, because you already know the answers. The stranger does not. You are writing from inside the business. They are reading from the footpath.
What should the top of my homepage actually say?
The top of the page has one job. Land your promise in one or two sentences, above the fold, before anyone has to scroll. Not a slogan, not a mission statement, a plain line that names the result. "Welcome to our website" is wallpaper. "Auckland bookkeeping that keeps you clear of the IRD and off the spreadsheets" tells a person exactly what they get and whether it is meant for them. One gives them a reason to keep reading. The other gives them a reason to leave.
Write the headline as the sentence you would say if a customer rang and asked what you do. Say it out loud first. If it sounds like a brochure, it is wrong. If it sounds like you on the phone, keep it.
How do I stop writing "we" and start writing to the customer?
Count the times you say "we" on your homepage, then count the times you say "you". If we is winning comfortably, there is your problem in a single number. Nobody landing on your site cares about your journey or your passion yet. They have a job to get done and a worry to settle, and they want to know you can handle both. So turn the camera around and point it at them.
- Lead with what they get, not what you do. "We offer 24 hour support" becomes "Ring us any hour and a real person picks up, so a burst pipe at 2am is our problem, not yours."
- Name the worry before you name the service. People buy the fix for a fear far more readily than they buy a feature list.
- Use their words, not your trade's. If your customers say "leak" and your website says "moisture ingress remediation", you have already lost them.
Do I need clever words to sound professional?
No, and the clever words are usually the thing hurting you. The strongest small-business copy reads at about a school-age reading level, not because your customers are slow, but because everyone is busy and nobody wants to decode the same sentence twice. Plain is not the same as dull. Plain is confident. The businesses reaching for "leverage", "solutions" and "bespoke synergies" are almost always covering for the fact that they cannot say the simple thing simply.
Read your draft aloud, the whole thing, as if you were talking to one customer across a counter. Any sentence you trip over, or would be a bit embarrassed to say to a real face, cut it or fix it. That one pass beats every clever trick going. If you want a fuller run at it, our take on writing and content goes deeper, and the handful of things that actually turn a reader into an enquiry sit in what makes a website convert.
Your copy is not decoration you bolt on at the end. It is the salesperson working the site while you are out on the tools, and right now it might be standing there talking about itself. Fix the top of the homepage first, swap the "we"s for "you"s, and say things the way you would in person. If you would rather someone straightened it out for you, tell us about your site and we will tell you straight, even when the honest answer is that it only needs a light tidy.