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When starting to build a website, you have to keep a lot in mind. Between writing content and choosing the perfect visuals, some fundamental elements may fall by the wayside. But make sure you don't overlook one important thing: your website fonts, also known as typography.
Typography is defined as the visual representation of type. In other words, it's the fonts you use to communicate your content and brand voice. In some cases, it can communicate more about your brand than words alone. Your selected fonts should amplify your brand voice, your graphic design and web design (or web redesign), while looking sharp on the screen and easily conveying information.
In this guide, we’ll discuss twenty of the best website fonts, as well as tips for choosing the right ones for you when you're learning how to make a website.
The primary types of website fonts
The art of typography is rich and complex—ranging from aesthetics to text alignment and spacing. Before we dive into our 20 favorites, it’s important to understand the three main types of fonts: serif, sans serif and script. This will help you better understand each and narrow down which best fonts will suit your overall website design.
Here’s a quick summary:
Serif fonts
A serif is a small line at the end of a stroke in a letter or symbol. Many consider serif fonts as classical and elegant, and they are mostly associated with print publishing. Examples include Times New Roman, Georgia and Bodoni.
Sans serif fonts
These fonts don't contain serif lines at the end of their letters. Sans serifs are clean, modern and often neutral-looking, making them a great fit for web design. Examples include Wix's own Madefor font, Helvetica and the infamous Comic Sans.
Script fonts
Scripts, including cursive fonts, are modeled after handwriting styles. Keep this style limited to titles only, as visitors may find it hard to read body text in a script font. Examples include Lobster and Lucida Handwriting fonts.
20 of the best website fonts
These 20 fonts are ideal for website design since they are easy-to-read (see easiest to read fonts) and can fit a variety of website types. Several of them come in font families, meaning each font has multiple versions that you can use throughout your website copy.
Tip: In case you’re making a website on Wix, you can use all these beautiful fonts on the Editor, in addition to hundreds of other typefaces. If you have a different typeface in mind, you can upload your own font to the Editor.
01. CoFo Sans
Designed by: Maria Doreuli
This sans serif font appears sleek and modern with Cyrillic undertones. It’s simple and easy-to-read.
Download CoFo Sans via Contrast Foundry.
02. Lato
Designed by: Łukasz Dziedzic
A sans serif font equally suited for both titles and body text, its rounded, classic proportions create a sense of harmony and warmth.
Download Lato via Google Fonts.
03. Abolition
Designed by: Mattox Shuler
Abolition offers a strong, easy-to-read sans serif font. Composed of only capital letters, this attention-grabbing font makes a bold statement.
Download Abolition via Adobe Fonts.
04. Forum
Designed by: Denis Masharov
This serif font works especially well for titles and headlines, making it a good choice for your website’s primary font. Its Roman proportions give it a vintage feel.
Download Forum via Google Fonts.
05. Sofia Pro
Designed by: Olivier Gourvat
One of MyFonts’ best-selling fonts, Sofia Pro is a sans serif typeface with a modern look and geometric lines. Designed specifically to be readable even in very small sizes, it’s perfect for web accessibility, usability, business cards and mobile screens.
Download Sofia Pro via MyFonts.
06. Graphik
Designed by: Christian Schwartz
With over 18 styles to choose from, Graphik boasts clean, elegant lines and a variety of letter widths. It suits not only for web design, but also marketing assets such as newsletters, logos and advertisements.
Download Graphik via Commercial.
07. BD Supper
Designed by: Lopetz
Offering whimsical vibes, BD Supper has a modern, cartoonish and childlike feel, while still appearing clean and bold.
Download BD Summer via Adobe Fonts.
08. Palatino
Designed by: Hermann Zapf
Palatino is an old-school serif font that is versatile and easy on the eyes. This typeface has structured, professional undertones and makes a strong, powerful statement, similar to these other professional fonts.
Download Palatino via MyFonts.
09. Barlow
Designed by: Jeremy Tribby
The Barlow sans serif font is clean and low-contrast, making it effortlessly readable. The typeface designer looked to California license plates and highway signs for inspiration.
Download Barlow via Google Fonts.
10. Publico
Designed by: Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes
This serif font has an old-school newspaper look that still works well for modern design. With several text families to choose from, the font is sharp and expressive with contrast between thick and thinner lines.
Download Publico via Commercial.
11. FS Me
Designed by: Fontsmith
This sans serif font was specifically designed to enhance readability for people with learning disabilities. Larger dots on the “i”s, extended ascenders and longer tails are just a few of the unique characteristics that make this font ideal for enhancing web accessibility.
Download FS Me via Fontsmith.
12. Magnific Caos
Designed by: Billy Argel
This classic gothic serif font includes decorative ligatures on capital letters. It’s dark and bold, with hints of white in each letter to slightly brighten up the forefront and add depth.
Download Magnific Caos via Fontspace.
13. Diastema
Designed by: Issam Boufelja
Diastema has a modern, whimsical design that uses long and sometimes joining ligatures. It has a fancy, classy feel that pairs well with clean, modern imagery.
Download Diastema via MyFonts.
14. Caponi
Designed by: Miguel Reyes, Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes
Caponi is a versatile serif font with three families offering slightly different, yet complementary, presentations: Caponi Display has a modern look ideal for titles and headers; Caponi Slab is bolder and perfect for large text and quotes meant to stand out; and Caponi Text is a mellow interpretation that can be used for any text.
Download Caponi via Commercial.
15. Caudex
Designed by: Nidud
Caudex was originally designed for print in the late 90s, but it has since been adapted for the web. It puts a trendy and contemporary spin on letterforms seen in medieval manuscripts.
Download Caudex via Google Fonts.
16. Eleven Twenty
Designed by: Fenotype
With a futuristic vibe evoking old-school video games, this font fits sites related to science fiction or other forward-thinking ideas.
Download Eleven Twenty via Font Meme.
17. FS Ostro
Designed by: Monotype
This serif font provides grace and elegance. It’s mellow, charismatic design is easy to read and incredibly versatile.
Download FS Ostro via Fontsmith.
18. Ratio Modern
Designed by: Kevin King and Patrick Griffin
This serif font uses a combination of thin and thick lines to make up each letter, adding elegant undertones to an otherwise classic design.
Download Ratio Modern via Adobe Fonts.
19. Lil Grotesk
Designed by: Bastien Sozeau
Don’t let the name fool you—this sans serif font has a clean, block-like style with rounded edges outlining the letters. Indeed, Lil Grotesk has a pristine look that’s very easy to read.
Download Lil Grotesk via Font Meme.
20. Poppins
Designed by: the Indian Type Foundry
Poppins is a sans serif type family whose clean, minimalist aesthetic is based on geometric forms and perfect circles.
Download Poppins via Google Fonts.
Looking for more inspiration, check out this combination of popular and unique fonts for your website
Roboto
This popular Google font has been available since 2009, and has been used by Google since 2014 for its Android operating system
Futura
Futura is generally used as a headline and body font both on websites and in print in general.
Open Sans
This font, from the sans serif family was designed by Steve Matteson, Type Director of Ascender Corp. It's considered a very mobile friendly font in terms of readability and is often used in apps. Another mobile friendly font is the Droid font also from the Ascender Corp or the Avenir font designed by Adrian Frutiger and published by Linotype.
Slab Serif
This widely recognizable web font is often used to convey sophistication and elegance.
Corbel
This highly popular and widely used humanist font was developed in 2005 by Jeremy Tankard for Microsoft. It's known to work well on screens and displays, making it a good choice for a website.
Lato
This well-known Google font was originally designed for a private, corporate user. They actually chose not to use it, which meant the font was edited and became one of the most popular fonts used on websites today. It's used on the WebMD and Merriam-Webster sites, as just two examples.
How to choose the best fonts for your website
Now that you’re familiar with some of the best fonts for your website, here’s a guide for choosing the right ones:
01. Your fonts should match your brand voice and design theme
Fonts are an indispensable component of branding. Ensure that your font scheme is cohesive with the rest of your visual brand assets, such as email and newsletter text, business cards, slogans and logo design.
Whether it's sophisticated and trendy or rugged and adventurous, typography design should contribute to your website’s story. Consider your website's purpose and your overall design theme, as well as the niche that you want to attract. Then, choose fonts that align.
According to Yaya Aaronsohn, Head of Brand Maker at Wix,
"Each combination of design elements holds the potential to evoke specific emotions, convey subtle messages, and leave a lasting impression on viewers. From the choice of font to the selection of colors and the incorporation of graphic elements - every detail plays a crucial role in shaping the overall identity of a brand."
02. Make sure fonts are readable
Some of the best website typography examples are the ones that understand readability is one of the most important aspects of a successful web design. Andika is a great example of a very readable font type. How well users can read the text on your site affects how well and how quickly they comprehend the presented information.
Poor font choices, small letters due to reduced font size and multiple uncomplimentary fonts can discourage users from reading your content and even keep them from spending time on your site.
03. Use complementary fonts
Don't use more than three fonts on your website. Not only will this practice improve your site's design and make it easier to read, but limiting the number of fonts will make your website more accessible, too.
If using multiple fonts, choose a primary font, a secondary font and an optional accent font. You can also opt for a font family in which each font varies slightly in design but complement each other throughout the same website.
Primary fonts: Your primary font is the most visible one, and you should use it on the headers and titles throughout your website. Visitors will most associate this font with your brand, even if you don't use it the most throughout your site. As a result, the primary font can be more dominant and distinct than the rest of your fonts.
Secondary fonts: You'll use your secondary font across the bulk of your website’s written content. This includes paragraphs, descriptions, blog articles and more. While your primary font can be eye-catching and unique, your secondary font should be, first and foremost, highly legible. Visitors will find it hard to read ornate fonts over long chunks of texts.
Accent fonts: Finally, you'll only use your accent font for a very specific purpose. When it comes to websites, the accent font is usually reserved for calls-to-action, since they can draw attention to your most important buttons on the page.
When deciding which fonts to combine, you can choose from many methods. Consider that opposites can work well together by creating contrast, so perhaps you want to try a simple, serif font with a more futuristic sans serif option. You can also stick to fonts that belong to the same family, too. Since they pair well, doing so can provide consistency throughout your site. Using website templates can help make this process seamless, too.
To help you mix and match typefaces for your website, here are our designers’ favorite font pairings:
04. Consider website speed and performance
Larger files and more intricate web design elements affect the speed and performance of your site. This applies to website fonts, too. If you’re using third-party fonts from Google, for example, you can assume that these fonts will affect loading speed more than web-safe fonts. Web-safe fonts refer to common fonts that exist by default on computers and don’t need to be downloaded (Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Tahoma, Palatino, Didot Serif and Garabond are some of the most common examples of web-safe fonts).
Every font you use increases page load speed, so you’ll need to optimize your web fonts. Some of the best ways to do this include not using more than 3 fonts and using less text where possible. Another tip is to implement cookies on your site, which allows browsers to store website fonts so it doesn’t need to download them over and over.
As a precaution, set a fallback, web-safe font in case your user's device can't display your chosen font. This can happen if there’s a glitch on your site, or if a user accesses your site from an older computer or has a slower connection. Web safe fonts originated in 2009 from the original font foundry, Typotheque, who are also best known for the Fedra font families, designed by Peter Biľak.
05. Account for website accessibility
75% of Americans with disabilities use the internet on a daily basis, 3.3% of which are visually impaired. Anyone designing a website should consider creating an online experience accessible to all. Certain fonts can be hard for anyone to read, even if they aren’t dealing with issues like vision impairment or dyslexia.
To create an accessible website, use clear, straightforward typefaces that are free of excess ligatures. Not only can screen readers more easily comprehend these fonts, but visually impaired individuals can navigate your site more easily, too. Your typefaces should have distinct letters, not be cluttered and take kerning into account (amount of space between individual characters of a font).
06. Determine sizing and visual weight
Once you’ve chosen your website fonts, you’ll need to decide on different letter sizes for large titles, subtitles and paragraph text. Apart from font size, additional factors that impact a font's visual weight include stylistic components like bold, italic or underlining, as well as lettering. However, excessive use of these styles may result in an overwhelming effect and could ultimately detract from your message, so use them in moderation.
To get you started, we’ve put together these ranges as a general guideline for most websites as inspiration:
Titles: 30-70px
Subtitles: 22-30px
Paragraph: 16-20px
Tip: If you’re creating a website on Wix, you can customize and save text themes so that your titles, subtitles, and paragraph text will always maintain a consistent font, size and weight.
What's the difference between web fonts and web safe fonts?
Web fonts are fonts that are hosted on a server and downloaded by the user's browser when they visit a website. Web fonts can be used to create a more unique and visually appealing website, but they can also slow down the loading speed of a website.
Web safe fonts are fonts that are pre-installed on most devices. This means that web safe fonts will always display correctly on a user's device, regardless of whether the user has the font installed on their computer.
If you're looking for a wider range of font choices and a more unique look for your website, then you may want to use web fonts. However, it's important to keep in mind that web fonts can slow down the loading speed of your website.
If you're concerned about the loading speed of your website, or if you need to make sure that your website looks the same on all devices, then you may want to use web safe fonts. Web safe fonts are always available, so they won't slow down the loading speed of your website.
Best fonts for websites FAQ
What are some of the best fonts for a website?
The best font for websites depends on the purpose of the website and the target audience. However, some popular and well-regarded fonts for websites include Helvetica, Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Roboto.
Helvetica is a sans-serif font known for its clean and simple design.
Arial is another popular sans-serif font that is similar to Helvetica. It's a bit more informal while still being versatile and professional.
Georgia is a serif font that is known for its classic and elegant appearance. It's a good choice for websites that want to create a more traditional or formal look.
Tahoma is a sans-serif font that is similar to Arial, but it's a bit wider and has more space between the letters. This makes it a good choice for websites that want to make their text easy to read.
Roboto is a sans-serif font that's designed to be used on screens. It's a modern and versatile font that is well-suited for websites.