What Size Font Should I Use on My Private Practice Website?

by | Oct 3, 2018 | Creating Your Website, Design & Inspiration, How To & Tips

Writing great copy for your private practice website is one step toward attracting more clients. But the other step is presenting that information – through your website’s design –  in a way that’s easy to read. This is why the size of the font on your website is so important.

Writing great copy for your private practice website is one step toward attracting more clients. But the other step is presenting that information - through your website’s design - in a way that’s easy to read. This is why the size of the font on your website is so important.

In this article we’ll talk about a few things to consider when choosing your website’s font size and answer the question, “what size font should I use on my private practice website?”

Some Things to Consider

Like the colors you choose for your website, your fonts and font size have an impact on the way your brand and practice are viewed by the end user.

If your practice is geared toward the parents of young children, your brand may be more bold and upbeat.

So, you may use larger, more creative fonts for headlines and brighter colors as compared to a website whose primary audience is, let’s say, older adults over 60.

And as a general rule, it’s best that your fonts be too big than too small.

Research has shown that small font sizes & low-contrast are the #1 complaint for web users as it relates to reading online. (Source)

This means that you’ll definitely want to take into account your ideal client.

Example:

I recently worked with an amazing client, Karen Midyet on her new coaching website www.coachingagingadults.com.

Because her practice is focused solely on aging adults and their caretakers, we had to make sure that fonts were easy to read.

This meant bolder headlines, a larger font for body copy and high contrast design.

coaching aging adults font size blog

If we didn’t know her ideal audience, who she wanted to reach and how they’d be using her website, we wouldn’t have gone with such large fonts.

So, step one to deciding the size of your fonts is to know who will be using your website so you can create the best user experience possible.

Headline Fonts vs Body Copy Fonts

There are typically two main categories of fonts on your website: headers and body copy.

Header Font Sizes

You’ll have a font for various headers (these are your H1, H2, H3, etc.), which help to create organization and a hierarchy for your page content.

With headline fonts, it’s best to stick to what’s called modular scaled font sizes.

What the heck are those?

“[Modular scaled font sizes are] a series of harmonious font sizes that have the perfect proportion that the general public view as “beautiful.” (Source)

This includes the following font sizes: 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 95

So when you’re setting the font size of your headers, you can use a hierarchy, like so:

  • Your H1 (usually the page title will be in an H1 tag so it’s the most important): 48 pixels
  • Your H2: 32 pixels
  • Your H3: 24 pixels
  • Your H4: While 18 is not in the list above, if you need a subheader slightly larger than your body copy, you can use 18 pixels here.

Body Copy Font Size

The next category of font that you’ll have on your website is the body copy.

This is the main group of text that will make up the content on your website.

It’s the meat and potatoes. The bulk of your blog posts, informational pages and will carry most of the important details you want to communicate to your clients.

With body copy, you want to make sure the size doesn’t hinder your visitor’s ability to read it.

On average, the ideal size of your body copy font, according to our modular scaled font sizes above, is 16 pixels.

This size is not too big and not too small for the average reader.

It’s the font size I use on 90% of the websites I design.

But, like with most things in design, rules can often be broken WHEN it makes sense.

In the case of the Coaching Aging Adults website I mentioned above, we knew that the audience for this site would be aging adults that may have vision challenges.

We made the body copy size a whopping 18 pixels to make sure that the target audience would have no trouble reading the content on the website.

Again, knowing your audience will help you make the right design decisions on your private practice website.

Conclusion

There you have it! A simple guideline for setting the font sizes on your private practice website.

The best thing to keep in mind is who your ideal client is, how they will use your website.

Take them into account with any website design decision to ensure you’re making it as easy as possible for them to read your content and use your website.

[av_sidebar widget_area=’Blog Post Resource Library Opt In’ av_uid=’av-2y5he8′]

Grow your private practice with a new website strategy.

Get more traffic. Get more clients. Scale your practice.

 

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This