How Typography Affects Conversion

Have you ever been on a website that looked like an ad – the website colors, images, layout, and fonts just looked incredibly fake? I’m sure you clicked away pretty fast. It’s easy to pinpoint a well-designed website from a poorly designed website, and your website visitors will recognize this. More importantly than the pictures you place on your homepage, is the font you use on your website. In fact, fonts can increase conversions on your website! Don’t believe me? Think about it. If a consumer is having trouble reading the information on your website, you can probably guarantee they won’t stay there that long. That’s just one example. Let’s dive into the reasons font is impacting your website visits.

Okay, I lied. It’s not just font that affects your website conversions, but a broader category of typeface that includes font. Typeface incorporates other attributes that impact how your language is shown on your website. This includes spacing of lines, words, and letters, which affects readability as well. Specific spacing or lack of spacing can make your reader feel overwhelmed, which leads them to click away.

IT’S MORE THAN JUST FONTS

Fonts aren’t the end all be all. If you can’t read the font because all the letters are too squished together, it doesn’t matter what kind of font it is. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Line length – This is how long the text is between each margin on the left and right side of the page. When lines are too long or too short, this makes reading your content feel awkward. This can also be affected depending on whether your content is on a desktop or mobile device, as the settings may change for the platform.

Leading – This is the amount of space between each line vertically, from baseline to baseline. Increasing your leading can make it easier for the reader to read the text, and keep them more engaging for long as it doesn’t put as much strain on the eyes.

Kerning – Ever notice that space between each letter/character? Me neither! Usually, this spacing tends to be innate, meaning the way it comes is generally sufficed for most. Although the spacing can be changed to improve a design.

Tracking – This is the spacing over a specific amount of letters and characters. Have a paragraph that looks like you packed too much wording into it? Increase the tracking, trust me, your readers will thank you.  

HOW DOES THIS LEAD TO CONVERSIONS?

It’s not about just looking pretty – picking a font gets down to the basics of psychology. Consumers want to follow brands they believe are trustworthy. This may not always be consciously, but we buy products and services from brands that we think will deliver. We expect to receive that product and service in the way we intended when purchasing. Just like we have judgments about a new person we meet, a candidate during an interview, or a partner on the first date, we have opinions about design. If a font looks risky, we automatically associate the brand with this attribute as well. Our brain is fastly calculating the impression and trust from first encounters.

The font you’re using is an extension of this. Psychologically, some fonts keep consumers on your website longer and therefore increasing conversion. Phil Renaud, a web designer, did his own experiment to test this out. Over his college career, he wrote 52 essays that ranged by 3 fonts. His grades for these college essays varied depending on the font he used! Here were his results:

Times New Roman: A-
Trebuchet MS: B-
Georgia: A

Crazy, isn’t it?! With an assignment like an essay, where they all pretty much look the same, the font is still part of the impression. Imagine all the websites your competing with!

EASY STEPS TO IMPROVE YOUR TYPOGRAPHY

If you’ve been cruising through this article thus far and just want a simple answer, it makes your text readable. The best way to present typography most effectively to keep consumers on your website is to make your text as enjoyable as possible. If you need help selecting a new font to check out this font combination tool by Bold Web Design. Your typography is just a vehicle for consumers to get to the content of your website. If the car gets the job done and most effectively, then you’ll see the conversions.

Not sure where to start? Try using these steps.

1. Look over your headlines. Decluttering your headlines, can make them easier to read and in turn be more productive. Your captions should display the most crucial information and the reader shouldn’t miss. Make sure your headlines are large, spaced out, and not too close to other text.
2. Change your font size. Our brain processes picture 60,000 faster than text. Which means, any way to process text more quickly, the better. A quick tip? Increase your font size. Context is undoubtedly crucial, but a bigger font size tends to be read faster.
3. Fix your line length. The ideal line length is approximately 50-60 characters. If you make your line too long, readers will have a hard time focusing. Yet if you make it too narrow, the reader has to move back to another line very often, causing a discrepancy in the beat of the text.

Author Bio

Debbie Morgan loves all things to do with fonts and creative design. She is a UI Designer for Adelaide, South Australia’s leading web design agency Bold Web Design and loves seeing how fonts change the design of a site so much.