The JKB Marketing Blog

The amount of whitespace you use in your online layouts affects the reading speed, reading comprehension and overall satisfaction of your content.

A recent study conducted by the Software Usability Research Laboratory showed that college students had greater comprehension of articles with larger (10mm) margins. While they read the text with the smaller (2mm) margins faster by 8 words per minute, they expressed greater satisfaction and less physical fatigue with the larger margins.

And when larger margins were combined with slightly greater leading between lines(5mm vs. 4mm), the overall satisfaction level sky-rocketed. (Leading is the space from baseline to baseline of lines in a paragraph.)

While there were some definite drawbacks to this study -- only 20 students were used, and it only tested a single column format -- I believe it holds true for any copy over a few paragraphs. You can make your site's content easier to read by allowing for margins all around your paragraphs and not condensing the leading between lines.