We launched the third version of our marketing site on a Tuesday. By Friday, our signups were down twelve percent. We had not changed a single feature, a single piece of copy, a single screenshot. We had only changed the way the page felt to read.
The fix took a designer two hours and one paragraph of conversation. We rolled back the body type — from a tightly tracked geometric sans to a slightly looser, slightly larger humanist serif — and signups bounced back the next morning.
What the typography was actually doing.
Type is rarely about taste. On a marketing page, type is a service decision. It tells your reader, in milliseconds, two things: this is comfortable to read, and I should keep going. When type is unpleasant — too tight, too thin, too clinical — readers stop scanning, no matter how good the headline is.
Good type is invisible. Bad type is a quiet exit sign.
For us, the geometric sans was technically beautiful. It looked like the brand. But it asked too much: every line required focus, every word landed slightly heavy. Readers were leaving before they ever reached our pricing page — not because pricing was wrong, but because reading the page itself was work.
What we changed, in three settings.
The fix wasn't a redesign. It was three lines of CSS:
- Body face swapped from a 16px geometric sans to a 17.5px humanist serif.
- Line height moved from 1.4 to 1.65.
- Tracking went from -0.01em to 0.
That was it. The page looked nearly identical at a glance. But every paragraph now felt twenty percent easier to read — and we kept twelve percent more readers all the way through.
The lesson, briefly.
Before you change a hero image, before you A/B-test a button, before you commission another illustration: read your own homepage out loud. If it feels like work, change the type. The conversion lift is hiding in the ascenders.
