Best Fonts to Use for Business Websites

Fonts are often overlooked when designing a website.

Pause for a moment… were you consulted about your website fonts during the site creation process? Did you simply pick a font and the web developer said yes without blinking an eye?

5 Top Tips for Website Fonts | How to Choose Fonts Your Customers Will Love

Fonts are important because they improve the perception and experience of your visitors which ultimately impacts sales. Next time you create a website or optimize your existing website follow these font best practices:

1. Limit your website to 1 to 3 font-families
2. Pick easy to ready fonts on mobile devices
3. Avoid fancy fonts for the body text and limit them to headers
4. Pick a free font from Google or ensure you purchased the license for commercial fonts
5. Use large font-sizes

Let’s go deeper into each of these recommendations.

Limit your website to 1 to 3 font families

If you use too many fonts it will create an eclectic look. Fonts also need to be downloaded which will slow down the loading speed for your visitors. Your website loading speed impacts the bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors that leave your website without taking any actions (this is bad). At The Digital Navigator we use the Mont font-family which is a paid commercial font. Since it is a geometric font that stands out we decided to only use one font-family to keep the branding and experience consistent. For most business websites, you will want to pick one font-family for your headers and one font-family for your body text. This will keep things interesting without feeling disconnected.

Pick easy to ready fonts on mobile devices

Some fonts look great on the desktop but when they become smaller they are hard to read. These fonts typically have very thin line-width or thickness such as the extreme example of Raleway Dots. Fonts that are meant to look like handwriting like Mr Dafoe are barely legible when displayed in a small font-size.

Avoid fancy fonts for the body text and limit them to headers

Other fonts are really fancy with lots of curves and effects. Serendipity is a good example of this and is popular in the personal transformation and spiritual mentoring space. These can add a nice touch but you want to limit them to the biggest headers, such as header 1 and possibly header 2. When they are over-used they tend to exhaust the reader and make them concentrate excessively to read your web page.

Pick a free font from Google or ensure you purchased the license for commercial fonts

You want to avoid any intellectual property infringement. Google offers many free fonts which can be downloaded and served directly from your website service to provide the fastest loading speed for your visitors. If you use a commercial font make sure to purchase a license and read all of the terms and conditions. Many sites claim to provide free fonts while they are illegal copies of commercial fonts. This could get you in deep trouble.

Use large font-sizes

For most websites you want to use a desktop font-size of 16px or greater. The exact size depends on the font-family. When in doubt… make the font bigger! This makes it easier for people to read. If your target audience is an older demographic then make the fonts even bigger!

Not sure where to start with web design?

If you’re not exactly sure where to start, I recommend you read our latest free guide to UI kits–this is the backbone of your website design: How to Use a UI Kit for the Best User Experience | Web Design Principles Otherwise, you can always schedule a complimentary consultation to start your website creation or redesign process. That’s it for today! Get Help with Business Website Design