“Say less, better” is easy to nod at and hard to do, because the saying-less is the part everyone skips. Most attempts at restraint are really attempts at decoration: the same message, fewer words, a nicer font. That is not restraint. That is the same message, quieter.
Restraint is a series of cuts, each of which costs something you liked. Here are the three that matter most — and the order matters, because each one makes the next easier to see.
The first adjective is doing work. The second is hedging — proof that you did not quite trust the first. “Fast, reliable infrastructure” is weaker than “infrastructure that does not break,” because the second one commits, and commitment is the whole of credibility. A reader believes the page that has clearly decided.
The cleverest sentence on the page is usually about you, not the reader. It performs taste; it asks to be admired. Cut it, and watch how little the argument misses it — and how much faster the reader gets to the point you were saving them from.
Confidence, on a page, reads as the absence of hedging.
If the reader already knows it, saying it spends their patience and your credibility at once. Trust them with the easy part; spend your words on the hard one. The page that explains least to the people it is for respects them most.
What survives three honest cuts is shorter, plainer, and far more sure of itself. Nothing was added to make it so. Something was removed.