Selecting the Right Fonts Can Improve Website Conversions
In this article we take a look at how selecting the right fonts can improve website conversions by helping to align tone, style, and messaging. After all, making a website successful isn’t all about the amount of traffic it gets. It’s about the amount of traffic converts, or it’s conversion rate.
There are various factors involved in making a website successful. One of them is optimizing the conversion rate (CRO). CRO is a system that measures the desired activity taken by visitors. It most often means when visitors convert into customers so the higher the conversion rate, the more effective your website is.
So how do you increase your CRO with typography?
Choose Fonts That Fit Your Message
Selecting the Right Font For a Super Serious Contract Fail
Whether you realize it or not, fonts have personality. And through their personality they convey subtle meaning to the viewer. This is why failing to choose your fonts intentionally is a big mistake. Don’t beat yourself up about it though. We all do it.
I’m sure you’re thinking how big a deal can the font really be? Well, the job of the text you read is to express ideas clearly so the viewer has to do the understands them. A legal document printed in Comic Sans could be a very poorly placed distraction. Legal documents are generally serious documents and while Comic Sans is a professionally designed font, it’s not designed for professional documents.
Montserrat Font Family Photo
Apply this idea to your website. Ask yourself what tone your website projects. Does this tone align with your content, imagery and messaging? What font best matches this tone?
I play around with the fonts on this website more than I should. Fonts are fun and I can’t help changing them up. One constant always remains though and that’s the body font. It’s the one that is looked at the most so above all things it needs to be legible. This is also a digital design firm so it needs to have style. That’s why I chose the Montserrat font family. It is modern, stylish and extremely flexible with a range of weights and styles available on the web and in print.
Pair Fonts That Complement Each Other
Choosing the Right Fonts Because Complementary Fonts Complement Each Other
There is no shortage of font enthusiasts out there writing long blog posts about which fonts go best together. A quick Google search can go a long way to speeding up this process for you.
There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing more than one font.
- The old-school, probably unwritten rule is keep it to two font families.
- Fonts usually pair pretty well if they have clear contrasts.
Choosing the Right Fonts Pairing Examples:
Choosing the Right Fonts Using A Serif and San-Serif Combination
Consider Pairing Wide and Condensed Fonts
Choosing a Decorative Font for Headings is an Easy Way to Add Visual Interest
Pay Attention to Font Size
Font size carries a lot of weight in publishing but the rules of publishing your book are different than the rules for publishing online. Increased font sizes online can play an important role in increasing your CRO. This is the pragmatic aspect of working with text. Usability and experience and messaging and design all intersect when it comes to sizing. And there’s no silver bullet when it comes to choosing the correct sizes for fonts. How small body fonts should be keeps going up. That change affects font sizes all the way up too because clear messaging requires a clear hierarchy.
The minimum things you have to pay attention to are:
- Is a visitor going to have a hard time reading the text because it is too small? The current minimum for body text size on a website is 16px – 18px.
- Is it clear what a heading is, what a quote is, and what the body copy is?
- Is the distinction between your copy types clearly defined by size, style and/or color?
- Is the spacing between letters and lines natural? If the text is too tight or too loose it can be distracting and hard to read.
This is very important because if the visitor has a tough time reading or understanding the text then likeliness that they will leave before taking an action increases. This is even more important now that more people are visiting websites on mobile devices.
Resource: Interested in learning more about the best font sizes in print? Read Formatting Your Novel: What Font Size Are Books Written In?
Make It Chunky
What were we talking about?
The brain wanders when it isn’t engaged. Keeping the reader engaged over large bodies of text requires you to give it a rhythm and that is done by creating change.
The simplest way to achieve this is to create clearly defined breaks with succinct paragraphs. Too many words and too many sentences make content visually dense. Dense content not only makes it easy to lose your place it also makes it easy to find that hypnotic place where the brain forgets what it was doing.
Avoid Using ALL CAPS
Don’t yell at people, man. That’s not cool. BUT if you want to make a point or draw the viewer back to a serious thought THEN it might be appropriate to use caps.
Show some love
You wrote it down. You went through the trouble so you must want people to read it. It stands to reason that the more people who read it the more will take action and convert. That makes it important to get right.
