18 Easy Ways to Beautify Your Blog Posts – Part 2: Make Your Blog Posts Easy to Read

Designing a blog isn’t all about pretty colors and graphics. One of the best ways to make your blog beautiful is to make your blog posts easy to read.

Eye strain and fatigue is a real thing, so making our posts enjoyable for our readers encourages them to come back again and again. Today, we discuss 6 rules to keep in mind when formatting your blog posts and pages to make your blog posts easy to read so your visitors can have a great experience each time they stop by.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series in how to beautify your blog posts. Check out part 1 where I share 9 ways to make your blog posts scannable. Today, I’ll show you how to make the text itself easy to read. Part 3 is coming soon, so be sure to subscribe here so you don’t miss it!

10. Font size should be large enough to read easily

Don’t use tiny fonts in your body copy (paragraphs) they aren’t “in” anymore anyway. Body copy should be at least 14 pixels in size, but it’s becoming more and more common to use 16 pixels these days. It also depends on the font, so what looks normal in one font may look way too big or too small in another. Use your judgement and think about your older readers when selecting a font size for your main body content.

11. Use reasonable line lengths

Line length is the number of characters on one line before it wraps to the next line. Long line lengths make it more difficult to lose your spot as you read.

A good line length is right around 100 characters. To shorten your line lengths:

• make your content column smaller in width, or
• add more padding between your content and sidebar
  columns, or
• increase your font size.

12. Never use script, handwritten or display fonts for your body copy

Always use an easily legible sans-serif or serif font like Open Sans, Arial, Georgia, etc.

13. Use italicization for emphasis only

Do not make all your body copy in italics. Ouch! Use it sparingly to emphasize important words or phrases. Search engines consider italicized text to be of importance so extra SEO points for italicizing keywords in your blog posts! As long as it makes sense of course 😉

14. Try to avoid pure black text on white

Decrease the contrast a little between the body copy and the background. Otherwise it’s hard on the eyes. Instead, opt for a dark gray (I like #333333) for your copy.

15. Keep body copy left aligned or justified

Don’t center your text unless it’s a poem, caption or a short piece of attention-getting text. Centering your body copy looks amateur and makes it more difficult to read.

Why? Because each time your eye moves to a new line, it has to struggle to find the start of the next line because it’s never in the same spot. This may seem like such a small thing or a non-issue but studies have shown that large blocks of centered text actually contribute to eye fatigue. A nice blogger wouldn’t do that to their readers, right?

Alright, we’ve now covered 6 new ways to make your blog posts easy to read and 15 ways in total to beautify your blog posts, and I’d love to know what your favorite tip(s) have been so far. Share below with me.

Need feedback or help with any of the above suggestions? I’m happy to help, just leave a comment below with the URL to the page in question and I’ll take a quick look for you!

And stay tuned for the final part of this series coming next week where I’ll share 3 more ways to beautify your blog content and make it easier for your readers to read!