Forum Moderators: phranque
I just read a study on fonts and people's preferences
for them. As an experiment I changed my font to the second most popular one they had listed ( Georgia). Within two days sales were up 20% and have stayed up for the last two weeks. Thinking it was a fluke I checked my stats for this period over the last three years and sales had been pretty equal for March. Has anyone found experimented with fonts and got an increase in sales?
I'm using it for my entire main page,links, headers and one small article of about two paragraphs. I tend to keep everything short and to the point and have access to everything from one page.
I was using a times font, which to my eyes ( used to reading newspapers for fify years ;~) looked better than the Georgia.
You switched from a font originally designed in 1932 for use in print to one designed specifically for pixel-based devices.
Georgia is more readable on-screen than Times Roman. You may have felt that the Times Roman was more readable because (a) as you stated, you are used to it and (b) you probably have a better display than most users (as is the case for most webmasters). We all have to step back and realize that not everybody has high-speed connections, 4gHz processors, and 1600x1200 displays.
Both, however, are serif fonts, which are generally less readable on-screen than sans-serif fonts.
IF your increase in sales is related to page readability, it's quite possible that a switch to a sans-serif font would make a further improvement.
One of the negatives of using a sans-serif font on a sales page (and I am being specific here - I do not mean a product description page, but a page trying to convince sombody to buy some product or service) is that they can give a "cheap" or "pushy" look to a page.
It's useful to look through a magazine and record your initial reaction to ads. Give yourself a very short time (say, 1 second) and classify each ad as either for a "classy, quality product", or "cheap and cheesy". Then go back and see whether the font used was a serif or sans-serif font.
So, serif may be the way to go for a sales pitch. But to present information that the user must scan quickly to find what they are looking for, I think you are better off with sans-serif.
I note that WebmasterWorld uses a sans-serif font.
No, I'm using pretty standard stuff, three year old 1.6 gig comp & a cheapy LCD 17 inch monitor, so what I see is what most people see when they fire up the Dell ;~). I've used a variety of fonts since my business went online in 1996, but none made a noticible difference in visitors converting to sales like this change has.
Could my increase be due to some other cause? Possibly, but if it continues to work I'll run with it and ponder
the use of other fonts while I'm doing my banking ;~)
While I've always understood how important the "trust factor" has been for conversion rates, I've always turned towards trustworthy symbols/graphical elements to express the sense of reliability. I never thought about the font itself until now.
I would be really interested in seeing how fonts also affect CTRs
