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How to Add Google Fonts to Your WordPress Theme
Website customization can be done in different ways. One of the easiest ways to do it is to add custom fonts to your WordPress theme. Not only does it set your website apart from others, but it also helps you radiate your style.
Well, Google Fonts has different fonts that can ease up the customization process. There are two ways of adding fonts to your WordPress Website. You can either install a plugin that manages your site’s font or opt for the local hosting of Google Fonts. The later is done manually through coding.
In this guide, we are going to show you how to install Google Fonts to your WordPress site using plugins. We will also give you some insight into some of the best plugins you can use to achieve this. Let’s get right into it, shall we?
What is Google Fonts?
Now, before we get into the nitty-gritty details, let’s first gain a deeper understanding of Google Fonts.
Launched in 2010 and hosted by Google, Google Fonts is a collection of APIs that lets you access different web fonts freely. While it wasn’t the first web service to offer typography, it is the most popular of its kind due to the free license.
This service has more than 800 fonts available in different styles, sizes, and strengths. You can also browse through the font library as you sample different fonts that look amazing. Sounds interesting, right? Keep reading to learn how to add Google Fonts to your WordPress website.
Adding Google Fonts With A Plugin
The first step is installing a plugin that will give you access to the Google Fonts directory. Here are some of the most suitable plugins for that:
Best Free WordPress Typography Plugins
WP Google Font
WP Google Font is a user-friendly plugin that lets you add custom fonts to your website easily. Such fonts are added to WordPress and assigned to different elements such as headings, paragraph text, back quotes, lists, and default text. To prevent your website from looking bizarre, this plugin only limits you to six custom fonts. Not to mention, many fonts slow down the loading speed of your website.
If you are worried about the loading speed of your website, you can analyze how different fonts might impact it on the Google Font website. This gives you the chance to choose an effective font.
While this plugin’s overall performance is top-tier, it doesn’t have a feature that lets you preview the custom fonts on the front-end. You have to browse and preview the fonts on the Google Fonts website before assigning them to different elements on your WordPress website. The developers of this plugin also come up with updates when new fonts are introduced to the Google Fonts directory.
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Styleguide – Custom Fonts and Colors
Styleguide is a free plugin that lets you customize your website fonts and change the colors. It only supports default WordPress themes. However, more updates are being done to support other themes. This plugin also gives you a live preview of the final appearance whenever you make any changes. If the changes are satisfactory, you can save them and apply them.
It utilizes 45 different fonts from Google Fonts, which makes it easier to customize your site. Fonts with a wide set of character sets are also supported. This makes it easier to write languages that have many character sets. Examples of such languages include; Latin, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Devanagari, Greek, and Cyrillic.
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Supreme Google Webfonts
Unlike other Google Fonts plugins, the Supreme Google Webfonts plugin lets you select different fonts from the post page. Once it is completely installed, it adds two new fields on your post editor that allows you to choose custom fonts and change the size. Changing your text’s font can be easily achieved by highlighting text and selecting the most suitable font on the drop-down list.
Needless to say, the drop-down list lets you preview different fonts, saving you from the trouble of going back to the Google Font’s website to check out different styles. This plugin also gives you access to a family of 26 different fonts. New fonts can be added easily to the drop-down list through the settings menu on your WordPress dashboard.
While you can have access to more than 26 different fonts, it’s advisable to only save the fonts you plan to use since many fonts might slow down your website’s loading speeds.
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WP Typography
This plugin comes with a lot of typographic features that make your content look great. For starters, it automatically converts simple characters to the correct typographical symbols. A character like the minus symbol can be automatically replaced by the correct hyphen symbol (en or em dash).
Handling complex symbols such as quotation marks, exponents, the copyright symbol, and other characters become easier. Such features make it possible to write languages that have complex punctuation marks. Not to mention, this plugin can accommodate more than 50 languages.
So, if you want to provide your readers with an enhanced typographical experience, opt for WP Typography.
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Easy Google Fonts
Easy Google Fonts is on the most user-friendly typography plugins. After completely installing it, a new section titled typography will be added on the customize menu. This lets you add different fonts to your WordPress and edit those fonts to suit your style. You can choose different fonts to represent different elements on the family drop-down menu.
The font color, text size, letter spacing, and line-height can be easily changed on the appearance tab. All this is boosted with a live preview feature that lets you see the changes that you have done. While you will be able to view the changes on your end, visitors won’t notice any changes until you click the ‘save and publish’ button.
This plugin also makes it easy to add custom controls required to customize fonts on elements such as lists and block quotes.
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Best Freemium Typography Plugins
Use Any Font
Use Any Font allows you to upload a custom font file—25 MB or smaller— to your WordPress website. Custom fonts can be uploaded in different formats such as woff, otf, and tff. To convert fonts to the most compatible form, you need to have an API key to access this plugin’s server. Fonts that are converted to woff2 format are saved in your server.
This plugin is compatible with different themes and website page builders. In some themes, custom fonts can be used directly from the theme’s control panel. A virtual support system is available to solve any issues that might arise while using this plugin.
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FontMeister
FontMeister extracts fonts from different services such as Google Fonts, Font Squirrel, and Type Kit through API integration— the connection of two applications to perform a joint function.
If you want to access fonts from a particular web typography service, you need to enter the API key provided by each service. While other plugins don’t require you to use an API key to access the Google Fonts directory, you have to use it in this plugin. However, finding and keying in the API keys happens to be a tedious task that slows down the setup process.
Font Squirrel fonts can also be downloaded to WordPress on the plugin’s control panel found on your WordPress dashboard. While this seems like a simple process, it is very time-consuming. You can preview your fonts on the backend and use CSS selectors to choose different elements you want to style.
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Best Premium WordPress Typography Plugins
FontPress- WordPress Font Manager
Fontpress is a plugin that gives you access to fonts on multiple web typography services directories such as Google Fonts, Adobe Typekit, Cuffons, and @font-face fonts. It also makes it possible to integrate CSS fonts with your WordPress website.
With this plugin, you can customize any font’s appearance easily by changing the color, outline, size, and weight. It also gives you a preview of fonts in different formats such as italic, standard, bold italic, and bold.
If you want to style up your block text, you can use this plugin’s typography shortcode to add custom fonts; videos and documentation are provided to guide you through such processes. It is also worthwhile to note that this plugin is compatible with different builders.
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Over To You – did you find your Typography solution?
Well, the listed plugins are some of the best typography plugins that will help you add customized fonts to your website to give it a refreshing look. Most of these plugins are compatible with various browsers. You can also upload fonts in different formats, and they will be converted to the most suitable format that doesn’t affect your website’s loading speed.
In a nutshell, these plugins made the whole process of adding fonts to your WordPress website easy. However, if you prefer the local hosting of Google Fonts, you can opt for the manual method.
If you have any other thoughts you would like to share about WordPress Typography Plugins, let us know in the comments below.