046: Bite-sized Tips - Font Size Fixes for a More User-Friendly Website

Is your website causing visitors to squint and scroll away? 

In this short episode, Jules shares practical tips on how to make your website easier to read and more user-friendly. She covers the importance of font size, sentence structure, and strategic formatting to create a better experience for your visitors and help improve your SEO.

Key Takeaways:

• Font Size Matters: Google recommends using a font size of at least 16 pixels, but Jules suggests going even larger, especially on mobile devices, to avoid the need for zooming.
• Short Sentences and Paragraphs: Keep sentences between 13-16 words and limit paragraphs to 2-3 sentences to avoid creating walls of text.
• Enhance Readability with Bold Text: Use bold text to highlight key phrases, making it easier for users to scan the content and grasp the main points quickly. This can also help search engines understand the importance of certain words.
• Break Up Text with Bullet Points: Use bullet points to split up large blocks of text, making it more digestible and skimmable for your readers.

If you’re looking to enhance your website’s user experience and make it more accessible for both visitors and search engines, this episode is packed with simple yet effective strategies.

Useful Resources:

• Free Beginner's QuickStart Guide to SEO: Get your copy of Jules’ popular guide to kickstart your SEO efforts.
• Episode 016: Boost Your Conversions - The Top 3 Website Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Chapters

• 0:39 Font Size Recommendations
• 1:46 Breaking Up Paragraphs
• 2:30 Using Bullet Points and Bold Text

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

Good morning, So I've got a couple of tips for you today about making your website more scannable, more readable, and just making it look a little bit easier when people first land on it, so it doesn't just look like walls of text.

Font Size Recommendations

I was having a chat with a friend this week about her website. And the first thing that came up was about the font size. Google recommends not using a font size lower than 16 pixels. I would say really even 18 you could use. 

So for your body font, so for everything that you're using throughout most of the words on your website, most of your copy, really make sure it's never smaller than 16.

We were chatting about the fact that people tend to use smaller font sizes for mobile. She said that she did that. And I certainly, I used to do that before I sort of learned and thought about it a bit differently. For mobile, you actually want the font size to be bigger, if anything. 

Not when you, once you get to the really big font sizes, like your title fonts and things, but for the main parts of your website, you want it to be a bit bigger because people don't want to have to zoom in on mobile.

It's harder to zoom in and people just won't bother if they're scanning your website on their mobile. If they've got to zoom in to read something, then they won't bother. Even sort of 18 pixels is quite a good starting point on mobile. 

And always just check it on both, see what it looks like. I think if people have got to get their glasses out to read it, then they're not going to bother doing that.

Breaking Up Paragraphs

So I would say definitely do that. In terms of when you've got paragraphs, make sure you've got them broken up. So for a sentence, if you read what you've written on your website and if you have to take a breath mid-sentence, then that needs splitting into two sentences. 

Sentences really shouldn't be more than about 13 to 16 words in a sentence, depending on the length of the words.

So yeah, take that whole taking a breath rule as a guide. You know, make your sentences short enough for that. And then paragraphs really shouldn't be more than about two or three sentences long. 

Again, it depends on the length of the sentences, but if it looks like a wall of text, then it's better to break it up if you can.

Using Bullet Points and Bold Text

And that's where you're also using bullet points and things like that can help just to break it up. People basically should be able to scan a section of your website and know whether they need to read the whole thing. 

And also using bold and sometimes italics. I'm not a big fan of italics. Bold is fantastic.

So picking out the words within a block, within a paragraph block, that if the person only read those few words, the ones that are in bold, they could kind of get the gist of what that paragraph block is about. 

And that also helps Google as well, because Google will read, depending on how your website is set up, on what type of website you use.

If you mark something as bold, good websites should actually tell Google within the code that this is an important thing for them to focus on. So it all helps Google to understand your website as well. 

But think of it from a usability point of view more than anything, really. And also that it just allows people, as I say, to go through and scan it and pick out those most important bits and make that decision whether they want to go back and read the whole paragraph.

So I hope that's helpful. Have a lovely week.