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While WordPress doesn’t offer much in changing your typography out of the box, how to change fonts in WordPress has become one of WordPress developers’ most commonly asked questions, especially for beginners.
Even though this may sound subjective, your site’s performance highly relies on how good your website looks and how readable your content is. Let it be known that the typography in your content positively influences its readability. Many brands outsource such services, adding to their website maintenance costs. In this article, we’ll walk you through a rundown on how to easily change WordPress fonts to raise your knowledge from a design perspective. Let’s begin.
How To Change Fonts in WordPress?
There are multiple ways to edit WordPress fonts, but since this guide is mainly meant for beginners, we’ll discuss the three primary methods.
- Changing WordPress fonts using the site’s theme or Page builder font options.
- Changing WordPress fonts through plugins.
- Adding custom fonts with simple code.
Let’s start with the easiest and most common method.
Changing WordPress Fonts Using Site’s Theme Or Page Builder Font Options.
People usually avoid using the default themes offered by WordPress because they’re more like pieces of concepts. Even though these themes are very well coded, they must be better for a business website due to their minimalistic nature in offering customization and design options.
In simpler words, we’d recommend you choose and use a third-party theme depending on the type of site you’re building. Using themes with paid premium would be great since they offer much broader customization, but you can also use a free theme with decent customization options. Some great page builder themes include Beaver Builder and Divi. There are several of the best Elementor themes available if you’re low on budget.
Note that most themes allow you to access the Google Fonts suite
Now, to change WordPress fonts using a theme, you can go to the customization options and navigate to the Fonts section to edit your website fonts, or you can use the admin panel provided by the theme.
Working with the admin panel is much more straightforward. To change your WordPress fonts, navigate to the Fonts dropdown menu.
The second option to edit your WordPress fonts using the theme is page builders. The process here is no different from the admin panel itself. Beaver Builder is an excellent example of a page builder.
Changing WordPress Fonts through Plugins
Using plugins is the second method to edit or change your WordPress fonts. All you have to do here is look for a suitable dedicated font plugin, download it, and activate it.
In the WordPress plugin directory, you’ll typically find two types of font plugins. One is font uploading plugins, and the other is font embedding plugins.
Let’s discuss font uploading plugins first. You can quickly tell this by looking at the name of these plugins, which upload specific fonts stored on your device and integrate them with your site’s content. Google Fonts Typography is a famous example of such a plugin. However, there are many reliable alternatives as well.
Font embedding plugins enable you to choose your favorite fonts from the Google of Adobe directories and embed them with your site’s content.
An excellent plugin for this purpose could Optimize My Google Fonts. Again, there are other alternatives to that as well.
Note that this method requires you to execute extra steps to connect with Adobe or Google’s servers. In the long term, it is much easier than changing fonts manually.
Let’s move down to the final method – changing WordPress fonts manually with code.
Adding custom fonts with simple code
If you opt for a manual approach, adding custom fonts to your WordPress site through simple coding is your way to go. Now, coming here doesn’t mean that it is a challenging method. It is straightforward and learnable. You’re only required to have access to the WordPress core and some knowledge of CSS and FTP (File transfer protocol).
Here, you can implement this method.
Choose a font you want to embed on your site and select a style (Bold, Italic, or standard). Once you’ve chosen both entities, click on the Embed tab and copy the code that appears. Now, paste this code into your WordPress site’s section.
You can also opt for the enqueuing method, in which you copy the link to your site’s fonts. Refer to the example below.
<‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Oswald:wght@200;700&display=swap’
Open your client FTP and access your WordPress site files. Navigate to the child theme’s root directory, open functions.php file, and copy the code mentioned below in this file.
function add_my_font() {
wp_enqueue_style( ‘add_my_font’, ‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Oswald:wght@200;700&display=swap’, false );
}
add_action( ‘wp_enqueue_scripts’, ‘add_my_font’ );
Note that you need to use your desired font in the code, Oswald here is an example.
Now, you must determine where and when you want to embed these fonts on the site. You can use your style.css in the theme’s root directory. Add the following code to this file.
.body, .h1, .h2, .h3, .h4 {
font-family: ‘Oswald’, sans-serif;
}
There you go; now you know how to easily change or edit fonts in WordPress. Before we end, let’s briefly discuss why choosing the right font is critical for your site’s design.
Why Choosing The Right Font Is Important?
If you’re new to this, you may think that designing a website is just a matter of adding details like the color scheme and setting up a navigation bar and menus. However, that’s not the case. A lot goes into creating a website design, such as creating WordPress footers and dropdown menus that can offer a great look, feel, and, most importantly, the UX.
Similarly, fonts contribute significantly to the UX of your website, which is a critical factor in determining its success. Here’s why choosing the right fonts for a website is essential.
Branding
Branding is essential, especially if you’re running an online business. The fonts that you’re using should match your brand’s tone. These fonts should be consistent, good-looking, and, above all, readable.
Usability
Usability and readability are essential aspects of great content, and the fonts highly influence them. Suppose the fonts on your website could be more easily readable. Your audience will only spend their time trying to read the content. Instead, they’ll bounce off your site and look for suitable alternatives.
Parting Words
Using these three methods, you can easily change or edit the fonts of your WordPress site. Note that it is equally important to focus on other best practices in website design so that your website is always up to date with the latest trends and protocols.