Hi there, Reader!
Last week, I spent an entire afternoon creating a PDF on Canva, which both made me feel proud (it looked pretty good!) and also made me die a little inside. I hate PDFs.
Truly, PDFs are the worst. I didn’t realize how many people thought otherwise until I worked with doctors and health coaches at my previous workplace. In their defense, helpful content to them usually meant “printed hand-out” that you give to a patient or client as they are walking out of your office. Since we were a virtual-only clinic, this paradigm was not for us, but that didn’t stop people from requesting "one-pagers" (meaning PDFs that could be printable but never needed to be) and asking me to just upload them to a web server or attach the PDF to emails.
What’s so bad about a PDF? Here are 6 reasons to avoid them:
1. Edits are difficult and complicated. PDFs are much more difficult to edit than a web page. Every time you make an edit, you need to do it in a different format (usually a Word doc, but heaven forbid, it’s sometimes something that only one person on your team can access), and then export it as a new PDF. You then probably have to replace the original, unedited version online, which adds another step to the process. It’s complicated messy business.
Additionally, if someone has already downloaded and saved your original PDF, they’re unlikely to do the same for your newly-edited PDF. They will be using outdated information and advice.
2. Bad for mobile users. PDFs are generally terrible on mobile because they are not responsive, meaning your readers will need to zoom in on copy and scroll awkwardly to try to read your document. Considering how many people read primarily on their phones, this is a major consideration.
3. Huge slow downloads. PDFs are often very large files, which means they take much longer to download than a web page, especially on mobile devices. If you’re as impatient as I am, this means that you rarely take the time to read anything on a PDF.
4. Not-good SEO. When uploaded to the web, your PDFs can be created and optimized to be searchable by Google, but a lot of PDFs aren’t set up that way (for example, if you are designing a page in Canva and setting it up so it’s more like an image than a page with text that a person could highlight, copy and paste). It’s complicated. It’s also complicated for people to access them, and per the point about mobile above, even if a PDF is at the top of search results, many people (I raise my hand here) won’t bother opening it.
5. Limited audience analytics. When you upload a PDF to a content management system (like WordPress’ media library, for example), it functions as a single image or file. You can’t get user engagement analytics from it – for example, which links did people click? How long did they stay on the page? What website referred them to the page? You actually can’t really tell whether anyone read it at all. They might have just downloaded it and forgotten about it (they might not know how to access their downloaded files at all!). You will have no idea.
6. Do not attach them. If email is a part of your marketing communications, you should never attach them to mass emails because they will go directly to a spam folder – as they should. PDF attachments from mass emails are often malware intended to do harm. It’s always best to just put your information directly into the email (or link to a web page with the information if it isn’t central enough to include in your email).
After all of this, you may be wondering why on earth I would have spent time creating a PDF, but it was for a good reason: I wanted to create a scrollable carousel-like post about my consulting services for a LinkedIn post, and the only way to do that was to create that post as a PDF (this is unique to LinkedIn as other social platforms don’t let you upload PDFs — LinkedIn is weird). I’m not a designer, and it was probably more painful for me to do than people who create social content designs all the time, but I was pleased with how it turned out (here’s a link, which you can see if you have LinkedIn). Having said that, can I use this PDF in any other context? Not really. (I don't even think it's high enough resolution to print.)
And that’s why PDFs are the worst. Please stop creating and requesting them from your marketing and communications teams. They may send you a fruit basket at the end of the year.
Something else for a mindless moment:
I read mostly articles about presidential politics and the election this week, and you probably did, too (and that's good! I'm actually fired up in the best possible way right now! 🔥). Since you have most likely stayed up to date on all things political, I'll bring you something else, both timely and strange:
- Olympics Mascots in History. I'm not going to lie — I don't actually remember any of these mascots, and I was surprised when pictures of the Paris mascots (flames? tongues? candy? all of the above?) started showing up on my social feeds. The Olympics' official website shows mascots going back to something truly odd (click on it) in Grenoble (yes, Grenoble) in 1968.
Thanks again for reading my newsletter! I appreciate you. ❤️
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