Test Your Website
Learn how to increase visitor action, reduce site confusion for new visitors, and get those new visitors returning back for more! Get BWI's Usability and Design Analysis.
Increase Line Height – I Bet It Will Help
By Robert Campbell on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Previous: Tweet Later – Tools to Boost Your Productivity on Twitter
Next: Poll – Do You Use Card Sorting?
Well this is one of those a month a go today posts again. Looking back at my notes I saw that I made a few minor changes to my site, but what really stuck out was, “Increased line height to 1.55em, bet it will help!” Well it most certainly did.
How To Change Your Line Height
If you are uncertain about what I am talking about, or just have no idea on what I did, I am basically referring to the vertical space between lines of my main content (the stuff you are reading now).
The way you can do this is to simply add this line to your CSS file:
p {line-height:1.55em;}
It’s not required that you use 1.55em, but simply increasing what you currently might have could help. All it really does, is make your site a little easier to read. End results for me a month later?
- 3.55% increase in time on site
- 2.58% decrease in bounce rate
- 3.74% increase in total average page views
- 20.3% in total page views!
- and 15.96% increase in total unique visitors
Though I have done nothing really different in regards in marketing, I can only assume the results are heavily influenced by my change. Simply forgetting what anyone else said or says, I liked it a lot more bigger, and I think the numbers are reflecting that my visitors agree with me.
Like this post? Get website tips delivered by email straight to you. Full feed articles are delivered, and are managed by Google's Feedburner service.
Just Posted! Testing Your Journal
Related
Category: BWI, Usability & Design Tags: line height, page views, reduce bounce, time on site, unique visitors







Interesting results! I just published a study where I analyzed the line-height as well as a lot of other elements in some of the top sites around the world. Perhaps you will find the results interesting.
I read your article, and I liked the advice. You need to fix one thing though. All your sizes were defined by PX. You need to define by EM so browsers can adjust for those who like even bigger fonts. Even your line height can and should be defined by EM.