Ever noticed how most websites—from a New York Times article to your email inbox—don’t use the full width of your screen? This isn’t a mistake; it’s a deliberate design choice.

Many websites and email formats use narrow, single-column layouts, typically 600–700 pixels wide, to dramatically improve the user experience. It all boils down to readability, focus, and mobile-friendliness.

The Core Benefits: Readability, Focus, and Mobile

There are three primary reasons why this design pattern is so effective and popular.

1. It’s All About Readability

Research shows that the optimal line length for comfortable reading is 50–75 characters. Narrow layouts achieve this sweet spot.

• Long lines (like text stretching 100% across a wide monitor) cause eye fatigue. Your eyes have to travel a long distance from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, making it easy to lose your place.
• Optimal lines make content easier to scan and digest, reducing eye strain. (Elementor Blog: Website Layout Ideas)

2. We Live in a Mobile-First World

With over 50% of web traffic coming from mobile devices, a narrow layout is the foundation of responsive design. A 600px-wide column on a desktop can “stack” or “reflow” perfectly onto a 375px-wide phone screen without needing horizontal scrolling. This single-column approach ensures a consistent, usable experience on any device. (LinkedIn Pulse: Common Website Layouts)

3. It Enhances Focus and Reduces Cognitive Load

A narrow column surrounded by white space (or “negative space”) helps focus your attention on the content. It limits visual distractions and reduces cognitive load by presenting information in a single, digestible, top-to-bottom path, which is perfect for content-heavy pages.

Where Did This Trend Come From?

This isn’t just a new digital trend. It’s rooted in centuries of print media. Newspapers have always used columns to improve readability—it’s a time-tested principle.

The rise of mobile-first design in the early 2010s simply reinforced this principle for the digital age, making it a standard for good, accessible design. (MDN Web Docs: Column Layouts)

My Take: Putting It Into Practice

This preference for scannability is exactly why the posts list on my own website uses a multi-column layout. While a post itself is single-column for reading, the list of posts is broken into a two-column layout. This groups the content into smaller, defined “cards,” making it easier to browse—it’s the same principle of readability applied in a different context!

The Takeaway

Next time you notice that “empty” space on the sides of a website, you’ll know it’s not wasted—it’s a deliberate choice for better readability, focus, and usability.