So, how do you get visitors to spend more time on your site and reduce your bounce rate, without spending more than one second trying to do it?
It’s simple.
First of all get inside the control panel of your website (e.g., WordPress admin dashboard, or the equivalent on the software you are using). Now go to the section where you can tweak your CSS and other design aspects (in WordPress this is under the “Appearance” menu). Now find the line controlling the font size on your site, and increase it. That is it!
There are many case studies around the web where people used A/B testing to find how they could reduce the bounce rate, and increasing the font size works on most situations.
Just consider that the population in most developed countries is getting older and older, and that more and more people need to stare at a computer screen all day long for professional reasons (meaning our eyes are getting tired).
Then combine that with larger screen resolutions (where you have more pixels on the screen, but the actual appearance of the graphics gets smaller) and you get web visitors who would love to find a big large font on your site, so that they can read your awesome content comfortably.
And yes, I did increase the font on Daily Blog Tips a couple of months ago. It used to be 12, now it’s 13, and the bounce rate improved slightly.
I increased the font size too. For now I don`t know if my the bounce rate improved, but at least I read easier my own posts 🙂
Great tip! In fact, a couple of weeks ago I did a similar thing to one of my friends mobile phone. She is in her early forties, and would generally not reply to SMSs. I took her mobile, went to settings and changed to ‘Large’. Now she plays around with her mobile phone a lot more.
Yeah smart thing to do my blog too. If this is working that’s great!
Interesting ideal. Do readers know that they can change the font size in their browsers by holding down the Ctrl key and spinning the mouse flywheel? Seems if you cannot read the screen, you would find your own solution vs relying on 1000s of webmasters.
So, so true! Oh, the number of times I’ve seen 10px or 11px Verdana as main body type… it’s painful. It might be an amazing piece, but when it’s that difficult to read, no one will ever know.
Another important thing to check is the contrast of type against background. Luckily, the old trend of gray-on-gray has mostly died out, but many blogs can also benefit from making their type/background contract more readable.
I’m gonna try to bump my font size up 1 notch and see what happens.
Great tip! I found out that this site is using 13px font site .. I’ll test it out with the same and let you know about the results.
By the way, my personal experience is that I tend to read more on sites that have readable and relatively larger fonts and site design.
Great tips, along with that you have to go study your niche market for conversion rate purposes. That’s just one of the many factors to prevent high bounce rate. You should consider conversion optimization.
I was using 12 and then bumped it to 14. In the past two days, my bounce rate has gone UP, not DOWN. 🙁
Still, I’ll keep it at 14 for now and see if that improves.
One related thing to consider is the font face itself. I use Verdana, as do others but I’m wondering if there is a more readable typeface out there.
Really???
I’m going to review this right now on both of my blogs. Any simple modification that may decrease the bounce rate is attractive. Thanks!
Wow I’ll mail this page to all the narrowminded designers who continuosly give me PSD to convert into CSS with absurd pixel ratio, like 10px or 11px.
Thanks!
Hmm… not sure if that’s the only thing. Anyhow, I would ask a few of my readers this question 🙂
Along with font sizes, allowing the browser zoom feature to operate is another thing (i.e. relative size values than fixed)
That is a very good. Ablog should be easier to read. I would like to add that for the ease of reading, apart from increasing the font size, we also need to change the background colour to white or some other colour that doesn’t hurt the eyes.
Even after having said this, I use a gray background on my blog instead of white.
– Ranjith
Hi, I’m using DBT’s Vistalicious theme, where and what settings do I need to change in the style.css to increase the font settings. Jeff.
Good point. This should work. Which font size you recommend?
I like 13 a lot, but it depends on the overall design. You can test by increasing whatever you are using by 1 too, and see how it looks.
Not only text size but also color. I was on a high-end corporate web site recently with a reddish back ground and yellow type. Even at maximum zoom the site was nearly un-readable. I was researching the company for a possible affiliation. Needless to say I will not send my traffic to a website they can’t read.
I use 14 most of the time broken up by headings of 16-28. I regularly get positive comments about the layout of my sites, so people seem to like it.
Brent
For the background I would prefer to have white … and font colour will be always black.
An easier read will ensure that people stick around and don’t “bounce” away.
You can also make a post an easy read by using headlines, graphics and paragraph breaks.
Simple tip and right on! Thanks.
Being new to the world of blogging, I have a question about this. I get the point – larger font size equals easier to read, and a slight increase in the amount of time a person actually spends reading the post. But what does that actually gain me?
If a person doesn’t finish reading your post (because she got tired of the small font for example) she will probably move on to another site and never return. While if she finishes the post she might a) click on an ad, b) subscribe to your feed, c) share your post on social sites and so on.
Hmmm a bigger font may help but not in every case. IMO a font size bigger than 12 looks unprofessional.
Excellent tip. I use a font size of 12.
I’ve used 14 point type for the past 5 years on all my blogs. Definitely easier to read.
Oh what a wonderful tip. Ya I do bounce back immediately from a site if I can’t read properly.
Cheers,
Jane.
I especially like this tip because I was seriously considering reducing the size of mine so that I could get more onto the page.
BIG MISTAKE that would have been.
Thanks Daniel
Mine is 15px but still the bounce rate is around 70-75%.
Though adsense and adwords and similar services land you traffic but to keep them fixed to you depends entirely on how rich your website is in terms of contents. Anyways, the most important aspect would be to make the home page of your website so catchy that it compels people to keep navigating to your website.
LOL. A very simple and effective tweak. thanks.
Nice advice, I’ve just made a few changes to make the blog more easier to read, this happened after I checked my site via my cell phone, it was busy and crowded and kind of hard to read! So imagine if this is happening to me, what about other people who visit the blog?!
I also find that giving some margins between design elements of the page makes it more comfort to read!
Great tip! I bumped up the font size on my blog a few months ago and it definitely helped. Funny how we can spend countless hours agonizing over things to do, when something this simple is there to be done.
Yeah we should include these kind of things in our check list.
I immediately checked my font to see if it matches this sites font size. I should be good for now. Thanks for the advise.
Great tip! I think mine is at 13px, and Verdana, but I’ll be sure to check it. I leave sites with tiny text that are hard to read too, so it makes sense. I’d also suggest (not on this site but others) to increase the line height, or line spacing – not sure which. The space between each line – 13px font is great unless it’s crowded to closely.
KILLER TITLE ….
If you get tweet from Daniel mentioning these kind of title than I am sure you would love to check it.
Daniel I think you should increase font size more bit.