Most website owners spend time writing blog content but give very little attention to how the post itself is displayed. The result is often a page that technically contains good information but feels difficult to read — long paragraphs, poor spacing, and formatting that makes visitors leave before reaching the end.
Because every post on your site typically reuses the same template, fixing the template once improves everything you’ve already published as well as everything you publish going forward. That leverage is exactly why it’s worth getting right rather than treating it as a one-time cosmetic decision.
Quick Answer
A good WordPress blog post template needs a content column narrow enough to read comfortably (roughly 60-75 characters per line, not the full screen width), a clear heading hierarchy, short paragraphs, a relevant featured image, an author section, related posts, and one clear next step. The line-length figure isn’t a style preference — it comes from decades of typographic research and is even codified as a WCAG accessibility guideline.
The Research Behind Content Width
“Keep your content column narrow” sounds like generic design advice, but there’s a specific, testable number behind it. Multiple independent studies — including work from the Baymard Institute and Nielsen Norman Group — converge on 50 to 75 characters per line as the readable sweet spot. Below that, the eye jumps lines too often; above it, the eye struggles to track back to the correct start of the next line after a long scan. WCAG’s own accessibility success criterion for line length (1.4.8) sets 80 characters as the outer limit for body text in non-CJK languages, which lines up with the same research rather than being an arbitrary accessibility-specific number.
In practical WordPress terms, a content area between roughly 650 and 800 pixels wide, using a standard 16-18px body font, lands in that 60-75 character range for most fonts. Most modern block themes let you set this either globally in Site Editor > Styles > Layout, or per-template if you want a different width for a landing page than for a standard post.
Heading Structure and Scannability
A typical blog post should use one H1 (the article title, usually handled automatically by your theme), H2 for main sections, and H3 for subsections — skipping straight from H2 to H4 breaks the logical outline both readers and assistive technology rely on to navigate the page. This isn’t just a readability nicety: screen readers let users jump between headings, and a broken hierarchy makes that navigation confusing or misleading for anyone using one.
A clean heading structure also makes an auto-generated table of contents actually useful rather than a list of oddly-nested, inconsistent entries — worth checking if your posts use a TOC plugin, since a skipped heading level is often invisible until you look at the generated TOC output specifically.
Paragraph Length and the Mobile Majority
Mobile devices now account for roughly 60% of global web traffic, which means the majority of readers hitting your blog template are looking at a screen 375 to 430 pixels wide, not a desktop monitor. A paragraph that looks reasonably sized on desktop — four or five sentences — can stretch across ten or more short mobile lines, turning what felt like a manageable block of text into a genuinely intimidating wall.
Two or three sentences per paragraph is a reasonable target for most blog content. It’s not a hard rule — a worked example or a nuanced explanation sometimes genuinely needs more room — but as a default, shorter paragraphs consistently read better on the device most of your traffic is actually using.
Here’s the actual arithmetic behind that advice, since ‘shorter is better’ is easy to say and easy to ignore without a number attached. A fairly ordinary four-sentence desktop paragraph runs around 80 words, roughly 420 characters including spaces. At a comfortable 65 characters per line — squarely inside the 50-75 character range cited above — that paragraph wraps to about 6-7 lines on a desktop screen. Reflow the exact same 420 characters onto a phone at the mobile-appropriate 30-40 characters per line WCAG recommends, and it becomes 11-12 lines — nearly double the scroll distance, for text that hasn’t changed at all. That’s the concrete mechanism behind why a paragraph that reads as ‘reasonably sized’ on the screen you wrote it on can feel like a genuine wall of text to the majority of readers viewing it on a phone.
Featured Images and the Author Section
A relevant featured image does more than decorate the page — it’s what social platforms and messaging apps display when the post is shared, and a generic stock photo unrelated to the actual topic undercuts the credibility of everything below it before a reader has read a word.
An author box near the end of the article — name, a short bio, and ideally a link to an author archive — is a small addition that does real work on both sides: readers get a concrete sense of who wrote the advice they just read, and it functions as a low-effort E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signal that a templated, anonymous-feeling site typically lacks. For a worked example of exactly this signal at the article level, see how an author bio box fits into a WordPress template in practice.
Related Posts and a Clear Next Step
A related posts section built into the template — not manually curated per post — keeps visitors moving through your site after they finish an article, without requiring you to remember to add links every time you publish. For example, a reader finishing an article about choosing a WordPress theme is a good candidate for a related post about page builders or site layout, since they’re clearly still in the setup phase of building a site.
Beyond related posts, every article should end with one deliberate next step — subscribe, read another guide, contact you, whatever fits your site’s actual goal. The call to action doesn’t need to be aggressive; it needs to exist. A post that just stops after the final paragraph, with no related content and no next step, leaves engaged readers with nowhere obvious to go.
A Quick Before/After Check on Your Own Template
Open one of your longer existing posts and run through this in under two minutes: measure roughly how many characters fit on one line of body text (count a couple of full lines); check whether any heading skips a level; scroll on a phone and see how many mobile lines your longest paragraph produces; confirm an author box and related posts actually render at the bottom. Most template problems show up in exactly these four checks, and none of them require redesigning anything — often it’s one Site Editor setting or one CSS width value causing the entire readability problem.
Common Mistakes
Using content areas that are too wide. A full-width text column on a desktop screen routinely exceeds 120+ characters per line — well past the 50-75 sweet spot the readability research above points to.
Ignoring mobile layouts. A template that looks polished on a 27-inch monitor and was never actually checked on a phone is, for roughly six in ten visitors, the only version of your site that exists.
Overusing design elements. Too many colours, fonts, animations, or widgets compete with the content instead of supporting it.
Missing internal links or a call to action. A post that dead-ends after the conclusion wastes a reader who was engaged enough to finish it.
When a Custom Template Is Worth Building
Most sites can run on a single blog post template. Custom templates earn their keep for content types with genuinely different structural needs — case studies, product reviews, resource libraries, and long-form pillar content all tend to benefit from a layout built specifically around their purpose rather than forced into a standard-post shape. For everything else, one well-designed template, applied consistently, is easier to maintain and gives readers a predictable experience across your whole site.
Conclusion
The elements that matter most are grounded in measurable research, not taste: content width in the 50-75 character range, a heading hierarchy that never skips a level, short paragraphs given that most readers are on a phone, a real featured image, an author section, related posts, and a clear next step. Because the template applies to every article, getting it right once is one of the highest-leverage design changes available on a WordPress site.
Etienne Basson works with website systems, SEO-driven site architecture, and technical implementation. He writes practical guides on building, structuring, and optimizing websites for long-term growth.