<p>Studies of administrative burden – an onerous feature of state-citizen interaction – mainly focus on social welfare and argue that digitization reduces administrative burden. However, this paper argues that digitization may simultaneously reduce and create administrative burden, and that to mitigate these new additional burdens, the state needs to improve bureaucratic training and platform optimization. To explore whether these two types of state actions have an impact on the administrative burden faced by citizens in digital environments, we conducted a regression analysis using data on government websites in 56 cities in China from 2017 to 2021. The results show that both digital platform optimization and bureaucratic training can significantly reduce public administrative burden, with some substitution effect between them. Therefore, administrative burden reduction in the field of digital government requires a balance between technological optimization and organizational development.</p>