Your README Is Your Landing Page: What Every Open Source Project Needs
A GitHub README is the first thing anyone sees when they find your project. It has about 10 seconds to answer: What does this do? Why should I care? How do I use it? If it doesn't answer all three ...

Source: DEV Community
A GitHub README is the first thing anyone sees when they find your project. It has about 10 seconds to answer: What does this do? Why should I care? How do I use it? If it doesn't answer all three quickly, most visitors leave. I've reviewed hundreds of open source projects. The READMEs that keep me reading share the same structure. The ones that lose me share the same mistakes. The essential sections Title and description: One line. What does this project do? Not how it works, not why you built it, not the technology stack. What does it do for the user? "A fast JSON parser for Node.js" is good. "This project was created as a learning exercise in parsing algorithms" is a project diary, not a README. Installation: Copy-pasteable commands. Not "install it using your package manager." The actual command: npm install your-package. If there are prerequisites, list them before the install command. Quick start: Three to five lines of code that demonstrate the basic use case. This should work a