Generate clean lorem ipsum placeholder text by paragraph, sentence or word count, ready to paste into any design.
Classic lorem ipsum is the default for a reason, but it isn’t always the best choice. Depending on the project, other kinds of placeholder content can reveal problems earlier and make reviews far more productive.
1. Proto-content (draft real copy)
What: rough, unpolished copy written by a designer, PM or writer, the right length and covering the right topics.
Why it’s better: it exposes real problems early: long headlines, unclear calls to action, missing information. It’s the single most effective alternative.
Use for: landing pages, product pages, onboarding, anything where the message is the point.
2. Real content from the existing site
What: copy and data taken from the current version of the product, a competitor or a similar page.
Why it’s better: realistic lengths and edge cases come for free.
Watch out: don’t publish someone else’s content, and make sure you have rights to any images.
3. Realistic sample data
For dashboards, tables and forms, use plausible names, dates, prices and quantities, not “Lorem Ipsum, $0.00”. Realistic data reveals:
- columns that are too narrow for real values
- currency and number formatting issues (1,000 vs 1.000)
- long names and email addresses that break layouts
Tip: you can build quick test lists by repeating a line with a text repeater, which is great for filling a table with 200 rows to test scrolling and pagination. See How to Generate Test Data Quickly With Repeated Text.
4. Localized placeholder text
If your product will ship in multiple languages, test with filler in the longest target language. German and Finnish words are long; Arabic and Hebrew run right-to-left; Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between words. A layout that works in English may fail elsewhere.
A common trick is pseudo-localization: take English strings and expand them by about 30–40% with accented characters, for example [Šéttîñĝš ·····], to test overflow without real translations.
5. Placeholder images
- Use real aspect ratios (16:9 for video, 1:1 for avatars, 4:5 for portrait product shots).
- Test very small and very large images, and portrait vs landscape.
- Keep file sizes realistic so you notice performance problems. Resize test images with the image resizer.
6. Novelty ipsums
Bacon Ipsum, Cupcake Ipsum, Hipster Ipsum and similar generators are fun for personal projects and internal demos. For client work they’re distracting, and some contain words you won’t want in a stakeholder meeting.
7. Classic lorem ipsum, used well
For pure layout and typography work, classic lorem ipsum is still ideal. Our lorem ipsum generator produces varied sentence lengths and clean paragraphs, which is closer to real prose than a single repeated paragraph.
Which should you use?
| Situation | Best placeholder |
|---|---|
| Early wireframe | Classic lorem ipsum |
| Typography / theme design | Classic lorem ipsum |
| Landing or marketing page | Proto-content |
| Dashboard or data table | Realistic sample data |
| Multilingual product | Pseudo-localization or longest language |
| Usability test | Real or near-final copy |
For the backstory of the classic text, read Where Does Lorem Ipsum Come From? The History of Placeholder Text.
Generate clean lorem ipsum placeholder text by paragraph, sentence or word count, ready to paste into any design.