When designing an ecommerce website, font choice plays a bigger role than most people realize. Fonts influence how customers perceive your brand, affect readability, and shape the entire user experience. All put together, great web design helps with building trust and reinforcing your brand identity.
But you don’t need to be a graphic design expert or typeface designer to make the right choice.
Learn how to evaluate and choose fonts for your website, including eight standout options for ecommerce websites. Here’s how to make informed, brand-aligned font choices and go beyond defaults like Times New Roman or Comic Sans.
What’s the difference between a font and a typeface?
A typeface refers to a family of related fonts that share a unifying design. A font is a specific weight or style within the typeface. For example, Arial is a typeface. Arial Bold and Arial Italic are fonts.
Fonts fall into broader categories based on how they look:
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Serif font. Serif fonts—like Times New Roman—have small strokes at the ends of letters to convey formality and tradition.
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Sans serif font. These clean, modern fonts—like Helvetica and Futura—don’t have those extra strokes. Sans serif fonts are widely used in digital interfaces for their readability.
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Script font. Script fonts mimic cursive handwriting and work well for decorative headlines or logos.
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Monospace font. In monospace fonts, every letter takes up the same amount of space. They are often used in technical contexts or to create a utilitarian feel.
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Display font. These are highly stylized fonts designed for large text sizes and are best for eye-catching headlines, not body text.
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Geometric font. Geometric fonts are a subcategory of sans serif fonts, using clean, simple shapes for a modern look.
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Humanist font. These are based on traditional handwriting fonts and feel warm, readable, and approachable.
How to choose the right font for your website
- Prioritize readability and accessibility
- Align with your brand identity
- Consider performance
- Ensure screen compatibility
The best fonts for your website will reflect your brand personality while ensuring your target audience can easily read your content across different browsers and devices. Here are the criteria to guide your selection:
1. Prioritize readability and accessibility
The right fonts will be legible at all sizes, especially on mobile devices. Look for open letterforms, generous spacing, and moderate contrast between thick and thin strokes. Avoid thin or decorative fonts for body text. Fonts such as Inclusive Sans and Noto Sans are web-safe fonts for many use cases, designed with accessibility in mind.
🌟Learn more about designing accessible ecommerce sites.
2. Align with your brand identity
Your font choice should reflect your brand voice and brand values. Your brand identity should guide your type decisions, helping you stay consistent across customer touchpoints. Certain fonts are known for conveying specific voices and tones.
Here are some common brand traits and how they translate into font characteristics:
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Elegant. Serif fonts such as EB Garamond or GT Alpina bring a sense of sophistication.
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Bold. Strong sans serif fonts like GT Standard project confidence.
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Playful. Rounder or more expressive fonts, such as ABC Rom, communicate a friendly tone.
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Minimalist. Neutral, geometric fonts like Suisse convey the simplicity and modernity that define minimalist design.
Before deciding, try typing key brand phrases in different fonts to see how the tone shifts.
3. Consider performance
Using too many typefaces can slow down your site. Stick to one or two font families and use web-optimized formats such as Web Open Font Format 2.0 (WOFF2). When you download a font, it’ll normally be saved as a .ttf or .otf file. If your font files aren’t already in WOFF2, you can convert them using free tools like Transfonter or Font Squirrel’s Webfont Generator.
Tools like Google Fonts let you preview and select fonts that balance design and load time. Many font libraries also allow you to customize the character sets and font weights you include, which can reduce file sizes and improve page speed.
When choosing fonts, opt for only the weights and styles you’ll actually use—for example, regular and bold—and avoid loading entire font families if they’re not necessary. This not only improves site performance but also keeps your design more focused.
4. Ensure screen compatibility
Fonts optimized for screens feature:
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A high x-height (tall lowercase letters)
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Wide apertures (more open spaces within characters)
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A clear distinction between characters like lowercase “L” (as in lady) and uppercase “I” (as in Idaho)
Fonts built for web environments will often specify this in their descriptions. For more design tips, read Shopify’s guide to ecommerce website design.
8 best fonts for your website
When choosing a font for your ecommerce site, it helps to start with trusted, high-quality options. The following list includes eight popular fonts—ranging from accessible open-source designs to premium, professional-grade typefaces—balancing aesthetics and functionality.
These fonts offer a variety of tones and technical strengths to suit different brand needs and design approaches, whether you’re aiming for friendly and modern or more elegant and editorial.
Inclusive Sans

Inclusive Sans by Google Fonts is a sans serif typeface specifically designed for maximum accessibility that prioritizes legibility. Its open shapes and generous spacing make it especially helpful for neurodiverse and low-vision readers—great for brands that value inclusive design. It was developed with input from accessibility experts, ensuring it performs well on a wide range of screen sizes and in different environments. This font’s clarity makes it a smart choice for anywhere where clarity and ease of reading can directly improve customer experience.
You can download Inclusive Sans from Google Fonts.
Noto Sans

Noto Sans, also by Google Fonts, is a sans serif font designed to support over 800 languages, making it ideal for global ecommerce. As well as an incredible project in its own right, Noto Sans offers a clean, neutral design that has excellent consistency across scripts. This helps create a cohesive, multilingual site. It’s a strong choice if your site includes localization strategies or if you’re expanding into international ecommerce.
You can download Noto Sans from Google Fonts.
EB Garamond

EB Garamond is a classic serif font with digital polish, ideal for businesses wanting an elegant or literary feel. It’s great for long-form content and adds a touch of sophistication to ecommerce brands. The font retains historical charm while still offering enough clarity and structure for digital interfaces. Its high contrast and finely sculpted serifs give it a refined, editorial quality—perfect for brands in categories like publishing, luxury goods, or wellness wanting to evoke trust, depth, or heritage.
You can download EB Garamond from Google Fonts.
IBM Plex Mono

IBM Plex Mono is a monospaced sans serif font with a technical, modern feel. It’s part of IBM’s open-source type superfamily, which includes multiple coordinated styles—sans, serif, mono, and more—designed to work seamlessly together. This gives brands the flexibility to build a cohesive visual system using different font styles while maintaining a consistent tone.
Being a monospaced font, IBM Plex Mono is especially useful in UI-heavy ecommerce environments, such as online stores with complex dashboards, real-time product filters, or detailed customer portals. The equal spacing of monospaced characters enhances readability in technical contexts, such as displaying code snippets, specifications, or product details.
You can download IBM Plex Mono from Google Fonts.
GT Alpina

GT Alpina is a serif typeface from Grilli Type that blends classic structure—like balanced proportions, high contrast between thick and thin strokes, and traditional serif construction—with modern, expressive features. The result is a font that feels both familiar and fresh.
Its subtle, unique character details include slightly exaggerated curves, sharp wedge-like serifs, and unexpected shapes in letters like the lowercase “A” and “G.” These nuances give the typeface personality without sacrificing readability. Its wide style range makes it versatile for headings and body text, making quite a visual impact as a primary font or a secondary font. It’s well-suited for storytelling brands or any ecommerce business that wants to balance authority with creativity.
You can download GT Alpina from Grilli Type.
ABC Rom

ABC Rom by the type foundry Dinamo is a condensed sans serif font balancing a modern grotesque style with expressive details. Grotesque fonts—an early form of sans serif—are known for their relatively uniform stroke widths, tight spacing, and minimalist structure. Modern grotesques often refine these characteristics for digital use, adding slightly softer curves and more consistent rhythm for improved readability on screen.
What sets ABC Rom apart is its expressive details—such as tight apertures (the partially enclosed spaces in letters like “E” or “C”), unconventional stroke endings, and a compact, vertical stance that gives it a confident and energetic feel. Its unique characteristics include tall x-heights, narrow widths, and quirky shapes in characters like the lowercase “R” or “T,” which create visual intrigue without sacrificing legibility.
Available in a range of widths, ABC Rom adapts well across different web design contexts—from narrow mobile menus to attention-grabbing headlines. This makes it a versatile choice for brands wanting to inject personality into their design while keeping things clean and functional.
You can download ABC Rom from Dinamo.
GT Standard

GT Standard is one of the best web fonts you can buy because it is the embodiment of form and function, optimized for clarity and flexibility. A clean, neutral geometric sans serif, it’s ideal for brands or websites seeking a minimalist, trustworthy visual identity that doesn’t look generic. The font family includes a wide range of weights and offers a strong typographic hierarchy, making it a truly versatile font.
GT Standard also stands out for its carefully engineered details, like consistent stroke widths and wide apertures, all of which contribute to its readability at small sizes and across devices. Its geometric foundation gives it a modern, structured appearance, while subtle humanist touches (like the curved tail of the “Y” or the open shape of the “G”) soften the overall feel. This balance makes it a reliable choice for ecommerce sites needing a professional look without feeling cold or overly clinical.
You can download GT Standard from Grilli Type.
Suisse

Suisse is a type superfamily from Swiss Typefaces with multiple styles—sans serif, serif, and mono—designed for consistency across platforms. It’s both a smart long-term choice for scaling brands wanting to maintain typographic consistency and a visually appealing font with broad design utility.
Part of what makes Suisse such a visually appealing font is its precision and balance. Inspired by the Swiss modernist tradition, the letterforms are clean and highly legible, with refined proportions and consistent rhythm across weights and styles. The sans serif style, for instance, has crisp terminals and generous spacing, making it especially effective in UI design. Meanwhile, the serif and mono variants preserve the same design DNA, creating harmony across different typographic roles.
You can download Suisse from Swiss Typefaces.
Best fonts for websites FAQ
What is the best font for websites?
There’s no single best font for a website, but versatile, legible options like Noto Sans and Inclusive Sans (both by Google Fonts) and Suisse by Swiss Typefaces are excellent for most ecommerce sites.
Why do fonts matter on websites?
Fonts affect readability, brand perception, and user experience. They guide the user’s eye and reinforce your brand voice.
What makes a font accessible?
Accessible fonts have open shapes, consistent spacing, and clear distinctions between characters. They’re easy to read at any size and accommodate visual impairments.