Is your website readable?

[SenseiSteve]

Your thoughts?

is your website readable? You would think in 2020, some of the following would be common sense, but apparently not.

You can have the best, well thought out and researched content, but if it’s not easily readable, your visitors will move on to other sites. If your selection of color schemes – font versus background colors clash, your visitors will move on to other sites. If you write in long unbroken blocks of text, your visitors will …. you get the point!

How important is readability?

 

[server]

Readability is of crucial importance. Unless it's the only source of information available.

 

[bigredseo]

Google places readability at the top of the list, and very important on cell phones. Many people build nice sites on the desktop, but completely forget about cell phone display. This is critical.

As a minimum, we tell all clients that they must have a minimum of 16px for the font size. This is Google's absolute mininimum. Anything smaller and Google ignores the text (unless everything is small, then they index it but devalue it).

Just like a good book, the cover is what gets the people to turn the page. The opening lines is what drives you to the bottom of the page, and a decent chapter will get you to the next chapter. If you take that same approach in writing and content on a site, you have a winning combination!

 

[John @ S4]

As a minimum, we tell all clients that they must have a minimum of 16px for the font size. This is Google's absolute mininimum. Anything smaller and Google ignores the text (unless everything is small, then they index it but devalue it).

I never do anything with text smaller than that, at least as body text, but didn't know that Google devalues small text!

 

[bigredseo]

If you're ever bored, have a look at the JavaScript that powers LightHouse (the audit tool inside Chrome). This is the javascript segment dealing with Font Size - https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/blob/master/lighthouse-core/audits/seo/font-size.js

This tool flags anything less than 12px.

There used to be a segment in the Google Page Quality Rating Guidelines but has since been removed and now moved to the Webmaster Search Central and Developer documentation regarding legible font sizes.