How to Choose the Right Fonts for Your Website

Choosing the right fonts for your website is crucial because they directly affect the visitor’s user experience and their perception of your brand.

Font choice affects readability, either helping or hindering your visitors as they try to consume your site’s content.

The best fonts reduce bounce rates and encourage longer engagement. For example, sans-serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica are often preferred for digital screens due to their clean lines and legibility at all sizes.

Fonts help to convey your brand’s personality. An elegant serif font may suit a sumptuous luxury brand, while a bold, modern sans-serif font might better represent a thrusting new tech startup.

The Right Fonts for Your Website

When you choose the right fonts for your website, you build trust and emotional connections with your intended audience. Amazing as it may seem, something as simple as font choice can improve your website’s bounce rate and visitor conversion data.

Conversely, a poor font choice can make a website appear unprofessional or outdated. This can harm a site’s credibility and suppress conversions. The optimal font selection enhances accessibility for diverse users, improves SEO through better user signals, and ensures consistency across all devices.

Your choice of fonts matters, whether you’re creating a flyer, sending an email, or building a website. In this article, we’ll look at the right way to select fonts for your website.

Define Your Brand and Goals

Choosing fonts for your website starts by aligning choices with your brand’s personality and the mood you want to convey. For example, a professional business website might use a clean sans-serif font like Open Sans to convey modernity, while a creative portfolio could opt for serif fonts like Playfair Display for elegance.

Consider your audience, content type, and the emotions you wish to evoke...

• Is your audience comfortable reading long-form text?
• Do you wish to evoke a sense of fun?
• Should your business convey trustworthiness as a primary goal?
• Are you trying to look and feel sophisticated?
• Does your industry benefit by appearing quirky, fashionable, unfashionable, on-trend, or even anti-trend?

You should ask and answer all these questions when choosing fonts for your website during the design process.

Prioritise Readability and Legibility

Choose fonts for your website that are easy to read at various sizes and on different devices. Focus on body text first, as it comprises most of your content.

Choose fonts with good spacing (kerning and leading), clear letterforms, and high x-height (the height of lowercase letters).

Test for responsiveness, make sure a font scales well and is still easy to read on small screens without becoming cramped. Browser-based web development tools and Figma can help simulate this when choosing fonts for your website.

Limit Font Choices and Create Contrast

Stick to two or three font families maximum and avoid visual clutter. A good rule of thumb is to select one font for headings and another for body text. Some designers may extend this by choosing a third font and using it for accents, especially if they’re using a monochromatic colour palette.

Pair opposite font types for interest. Try combining a serif with a sans-serif font, such as using Georgia for headlines and Arial for body text. Or vary different font weights and styles within the same family.

Use tools like FontPair to get free pairing suggestions and experiment with different choices. Look for fonts that harmonise and complement each other, rather than clash or compete.

When choosing fonts for your website, don’t rush. Take your time and test different combinations. You will usually find that you know the right combination when you see it.

Consider Performance and Optimisation

Fonts can slow down a webpage’s load time. If you need to, choose web-safe fonts for your website, as these are pre-installed on most devices, or use optimised web fonts.

Implement best practices such as subsetting (loading only needed characters), preloading critical fonts, and using formats like WOFF2 for compression. Avoid excessive font variants to minimise HTTP requests and speed up page load times.

If the above jargon leaves you stumped, contact a web designer with experience in this area and ask for help.

Ensure Accessibility and Inclusivity

Select fonts that have good colour contrast and aim to meet the WCAG AA standard of at least a 4.5:1 ratio. If your website has multiple languages, make sure your font choice includes all the characters you need.

Choose fonts for your website that help people suffering from dyslexia read easily, such as sans-serif typefaces with open apertures. Use browser extensions like Wave to ensure you meet accessibility guidelines. For more on this topic, see the following video...

Test and Iterate

Preview fonts for your website in context using your site’s prototype. Gather feedback, run A/B test variations, and check the fonts on different browsers and devices.

Resources like Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts (see sidebar) enable easy, efficient font embedding and testing.

Following these steps helps create a cohesive typography system that enhances your website’s user experience on the fonts on your website.

Common Pitfalls and Mistakes Beginners Make

Beginners often overlook how fonts affect usability and performance, leading to sites that feel unprofessional or frustrating. Here are key mistakes to avoid...

• Using Too Many Fonts
  Overloading with 4+ fonts creates inconsistency and slows load times. Limit to 2-3 for a clean hierarchy. And unless you’re an experienced designer, you should stick with two fonts.
• Choosing Hard-to-Read or Trendy Fonts
  Picking overly decorative or script fonts for body text reduces legibility, especially on small screens. Beginners ignore factors like low x-height or poor kerning, and this leads to eyestrain.
• Ignoring Accessibility
  Don’t overlook the impact of colour contrast, language support, and dyslexia on your site statistics. Poor font choice can alienate users. Small font sizes (under 16px for body text) or low-contrast pairings fail WCAG guidelines.
• Neglecting Performance
  Self-hosting unoptimized fonts or loading full families increases page weight. This hurts a site’s SEO performance and also increases bounce rates (SEO’s vicious circle of doom). And failing to specify fallback fonts risks broken layouts on your website.
• Poor Pairing and Hierarchy
  Matching similar fonts (e.g., two serifs) lacks contrast, making text monotonous. Meanwhile, inconsistent sizing or weights disrupt flow.
• Overlooking Future Needs
  Planning for multilingual support or scalability (e.g., adding more content) in future will avoid the need to redesign down the track. Most beginners also skip testing on real devices and miss mobile issues and problems with obscure browser incompatibilities. Fonts also render differently between Windows and Mac, which is frustrating to those who are overly fussy about exact design.
• Relying on Defaults Without Testing
  Using browser defaults without customisation misses branding opportunities, and not proofreading for rendering quirks (e.g., across OS) can cause unwelcome surprises.

To sidestep these beginner mistakes when selecting fonts for your website, start simple, test rigorously, and learn from tools like Lighthouse for audits. Better still, save yourself a world of frustration and give me a call.

Where to Find Free but Interesting Web Fonts

There are many high-quality, open-source font libraries that offer unique options when choosing fonts for your website. Focus on reputable sites to avoid licensing issues or low-quality files.

Here is a curated list of the best sources, emphasising interesting (e.g., variable, display, or experimental) fonts that are 100% free for web use...

• Fontshare
  Fontshare offers premium-quality free fonts with a focus on modern, diverse styles. This is a great place to find interesting fonts, such as variable serifs or geometric sans-serifs. And you can rest assured because all their fonts are SIL-licensed.
• Font Squirrel
  Font Squirrel is a hand-curated collection of fonts that are 100% free for commercial use. They include many unique display types, including standout options like Ostrich Sans.
• Google Fonts
  Google Fonts offers more than 1,500 free fonts, including variable options like Roboto Flex and Inter. Their curated collections make it easy to find interesting pairings, and all are optimised for the web with easy CSS integration.
• FontSpace
  FontSpace boasts more than 150,000 choices with filters for web-safe fonts, and interesting categories such as graffiti or futuristic.

In addition to the font sources above, you can choose even more fonts for your website using the bonus resources in the sidebar found at the top right of this article, or below if you’re using a mobile device.

When choosing a font, be sure to check its license because some font creators require payment when their font is being used on a commercial website. In general, you’re good to go if the font is governed by the SIL Open Font License.

If you’re using a font on your website, it pays to download it in WOFF or WOFF2 format for faster load times.