Google Fonts: Free Typefaces for Your Site
Google Fonts are now available on your blog — for free!
We’re really happy to announce that we’ve added over 30 free Google Fonts to your Theme Customizer. Even better, you don’t need any upgrades to access them; these fonts are free for everyone.
Go to WordPress.com → Customize to see the new Fonts section in the sidebar. From there you can browse and preview typefaces like Gentium Book Basic, Libre Baskerville, Merriweather, and Ubuntu. When you select a font, you’ll immediately see your site in the preview with that font applied. For most font choices, you can also change the size and style of the text.
Have you always wanted your headers to be rendered in Fondamento italic? How about Cinzel bold? Now they’re just a few clicks away, for every site on WordPress.com.
If you are still looking for that perfect typeface and Google Fonts aren’t for you, all the Typekit commercial fonts are still available for those sites with the Custom Design upgrade.
We can’t wait to see what you do with the new Google Fonts on your site! If you have suggestions for other typefaces that you’d like us to consider adding, please let us know in the forums or in the comments below!
- July 31, 2015
- Customization, Features
WordPress.com News 
Awesome! I wanted to see if I could use different fonts for my site. Does it work to do different sizing or fonts in the same blog post?
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Thanks! The effects vary by theme, but they are applied to text across the whole site. To get more specific styling right now you’d need Custom Design to edit the CSS directly.
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That makes sense. Thank you!
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Huzzah!
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Noticed this during the last night already. Very nice. Will you eventually be adding Typekit embeds with my own Typekit again? Which would be really neat. Just saying 🙂
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We don’t currently have plans to bring back the custom Typekit feature as many users found it very confusing compared to the simplicity of the font menus. We always try to keep the future open, though, so thank you for the feedback!
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Thanks for your swift reply. Enjoying the new fonts already 🙂
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Hi Payton, you wrote “all the Typekit commercial fonts are still available for those sites with the Custom Design upgrade.” but is this correct because I have an Adobe CC subscription with full access to all Typekit fonts but the ability to use them seems to be prevented – maybe you could clarify? Thanks!
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Sure! It’s possible to use a curated selection of fonts from Typekit on your site, but only for sites with the Premium or Business plans which include the Custom Design feature. At the moment there’s no plans to include support for using your own personal Typekit subscriptions, but we always welcome ideas!
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Thanks, I have Premium upgrades on my sites but the curated selection is very very narrow, do you know why this is?
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Our font lists were chosen to have the best quality and compatibility for our many themes without being overwhelming to users. That said, we did expand the selection a few years ago and we are always considering adding more! Is there any typeface in particular you’d like to see?
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I love American Typewriter – totally self interest of course, understand the need to keep things simple, and I am a huge WordPress supporter, just feel it would be good to have the freedom to use the broader range of fonts for those who already have access?
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Good suggestion! We’ll consider adding American Typewriter and also explore possibilities for using a personal Typekit account. Thank you for the input!
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I also meant to add, that when paying for Premium Upgrade for threes sites, buying premium themes and subscribing to Adobe Cloud CC it’s a little disappointing to be restricted – even whilst understanding the rationale in part.
Both would be great – not important though is that you took the time to discuss. Kudos!
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This is really a great gift for bloggers. Really! Well, we always have sugestions: more Sans fonts (not serif), as well as handwriting and grunge… even some Retro fonts would match!
Congrats, WP.com, and thanks! 😎
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Thank you! We’ll take a look at additional sans-serif font families. Is there anything in particular you’re looking for? We have limited handwriting-style fonts because they can sometimes be difficult to read, but there’s always possibilities for the future!
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No way! Really? I’ve been waiting forever for this! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
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@paytonswick: Well, for texts on main column and side headers, handwriting fonts really is not cool for reading. However, on the Title and description, those fonts would give title and description a more stylish look. I think mainly the sans-serif fonts leave the title and description too formal, lifeless, impersonal. Standard fonts are not pleasant everywhere, but only where we must read. Some places on the Home are to be viewed and tasted, not read.
I hope to find out some more stylish fonts soon. But, for a while, those in the Customizer are good.
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Very good points! We’ll see what we can add to increase the selection of energetic typefaces.
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Free features are always welcome! I saw this new feature last Wednesday. There are only two script choices. One works well with my blog site. How about more choices for script fonts?
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Thanks! Sometimes script fonts can be difficult to read, so we chose a limited number of them for this release. We’re always considering more font families, though. Is there any script font in particular that you’d like to see?
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Great Vibes, Parisienne, Pinyon Script, Satisfy, Yellowtail, and Snell Roundhand come to mind.
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Great choices! We’ll review those and see what we can add. Thank you for the input!
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I have paid for the custom upgrade so are you now telling me that everyone has access to those fonts without having to upgrade? Also are the Adobe fonts free to use or do you have to pay for those too?
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Not to worry! All the Adobe Typekit fonts included with the Custom Design upgrade are still limited to sites with Premium or Business plans. This release just adds a bunch of fonts for everyone else (including upgraded sites)!
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Can you add Tahoma font for RTL language. Thanks.
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Tahoma is a proprietary font from Microsoft that we don’t have access to. However, if you have the Custom Design upgrade, you can add a line or two of CSS that will apply that font for any user who already has Tahoma on their computer. If you don’t know how to do that, please visit the CSS Customization forum for help!
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I’ve found in the past that non-standard fonts will only display correctly on a website if the site visitor’s computer has that font installed. Is that not the case with these fonts?
Thanks
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That is not the case here! Your site visitors will download the font as they view your site, so they’ll always see the font you’ve chosen.
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Wow, thank you so much for this! 🙂 It’s great to have so many styles to choose from! Just one problem I had – when you make the Blog title huge or bold, it also happens for all the headings in the text, which is not what I wanted. Is there a possibility to change the size of the blog title independently from the post headings? Tangerine is a lovely font, but it only works in my title when I make it big and bold. But then all my other headings get big and bold too …
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… oops, I sent this before I was finished … it would be so great if there was a way to separate this. But it’s wonderful to have these fonts, thank you so much again! 🙂
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You’re welcome! In order to keep the font controls as simple as possible (and there are many possible ways to style a theme), the selection for Headings does affect both site title and post titles.
That said, for most themes the site title size should be noticeably larger than the post titles even if both are set to “Huge”. If you’re finding that’s not the case, let me know what theme you’re using and we can check it out!
If you’re interested in a more fine-grained approach, you can edit CSS directly on the site with the Custom Design feature available with the Premium and Business upgrade.
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Awesome! Can’t wait to experiment
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Woooohooooo!!!!! Great news!
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This is a wonderful new provision! 🙂 I like the Homemade Apple font for titles, as it looks like my own handwriting. Since you have been asking what other handwriting fonts everyone likes, I thought I’d chime in. Also, I love the Special Elite font that looks like it could have come from an old typewriter. I’m not sure if that’s a Google font or not.
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Special Elite is indeed available from Google. That’s a cool font and we’ll consider adding it. Thank you for the suggestion!
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So glad this has been implemented. Fonts (and color schemes) are the most problematic elements with some themes. This will go a log way to solving one of those! Just changed templates and instituted custom fonts on our main site. Only 4 more to go! 😉
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
(‘scuse me for shouting!)
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YOU’RE WELCOME! 😀
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In many ways, this is what a cheap bastard like me who won’t go premium has always wanted. That said, I noticed that with my theme (Black Letterhead), adjusting the text fonts to ‘large’ caused the comment font size to increasingly adjust upward from ‘large’ to ‘holy Jupiter.’ This happened with the comments only, and in your test viewer.
Thanks,
Rants
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Woah, that is really large! We’ll have a look at that theme and see if we can set things right. In the mean time you could experiment with other themes to see if there’s something that works better for you. Thanks for the report!
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Great.
Thank you very much.
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Yes @Audrey! More handwriting fonts … and I need some grunge for a skateboarding site!
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Are these fonts available in self hosted WordPress sites?
Thanks
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Right now this feature is available only for sites hosted on WordPress.com. However, the Jetpack team is always bringing new features to self-hosted sites, so keep your eyes peeled!
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Love having new fonts, but I am using 2015 and have the same problem others have mentioned, post headings are much larger than site title and it doesn’t look right.
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Glad you’re enjoying them! In the Twenty Fifteen theme, the site title is smaller than post titles by design. You can see the difference on the Twenty Fifteen demo site. The font size control only increases and decreases the relative sizes of the fonts on the site. I hope that’s helpful!
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I say this from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU.
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Thanks for this gift 🙂 That’s great!
There is a little problem : when I want to enlarge at “large” the Titles, the main one is decreased? and the post one is enlarged – If I use “Huge” the main one is re-increased a bit and the post one is really Huge?!
“Little & Tiny” are working correctly – I’m in “Twenty Ten” (and french)
Thanks for your help
Kate
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Wow, you’re right! The font size settings for Twenty Ten must be incorrect. We’ll update that soon so that “Large” fonts are larger than “Normal”.
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Fonts customization? Wonderful!
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More choice for everyone is always welcome, thank you!
This change seems to have broken the previously grandfathered Typekit account kit that I’d used on one of my sites since before the introduction of Custom Design on WPcom. FWIW I didn’t find it confusing-I set the kit up once on Typekit and my WPcom site and it was quietly running well since then. Adding my vote to bring it back. TIA
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If your site had a custom Typekit kit ID saved, this feature shouldn’t have removed it. Was this on your gammagirl.wordpress.com site?
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Hi-no, it was on justjennifer. The kit still shows as active on Typekit. There is another user in the forums who posted with this same problem. It would be really good news if we could have those back. 🙂
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Ah hah! We’ve tracked down the issue and we’re working on getting it all fixed up. Sorry about that. Thanks for the report!
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Fantastic! Thanks so much. I’ll also communicate this to the other person in the forum thread.
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Great feature, thanks.
However, I do have one concern. I gave the new feature a run on my test blog and changed the font/increased the font size. It looks great on my desktop but the font size is still microscopic on my mobile device. (The test blog’s theme is Piano Black, which has a tiny font size as the default.) Any chance there will be an option to let the changes carry over to mobile viewing?
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That is tiny! Believe it or not the font changes are actually carrying over to the mobile version, except that since that theme is not responsive (and as you said the initial fonts are very small) it looks extremely small on a mobile browser. We’ll see if the Piano Black theme can be modified, but in the mean time you might want to experiment with some other themes that have larger base fonts! Thank you for the report!
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A very good new addtion to the customize feature. I will be pondering which font I might use over the next few days. But what about introducing colour to fonts and body type?
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Thank you! You can actually change the text colors in some themes using the Custom Colors feature (for Premium and Business plans) and with the Colors & Backgrounds section of the Customizer. As with many style configurations, the available options vary based on the theme.
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Can you add Devnagri google fonts too?
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Our initial options are all Roman character fonts, but we’ll definitely consider adding other character sets in the future! Thank yo for the suggestion!
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Wow. Yay! Thank you! This was the customisation I wanted. I love my theme, and this makes it perfect. It is now just as I want it, and I like those fonts; I may ring the changes now and again.
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Eeeee,
I can’t wait to try 😀
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Great news! Question please: will any of the new free fonts change the fact that some things in my theme, Suits, are set to only be in capitals? Ie. header title (not using one right now), post titles, menu titles. Or is that a set thing in my theme that isn’t changeable regardless of font used? I do know I could change this by using a different them, but generally otherwise happy with Suits for now at least. Thanks, Marianne
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As you suspected, the theme controls the `text-transform` property that sets things like all capitals. The new controls only adjust the font family, font weight (bold, light, etc.), italic style, and size. To change anything else you’d have to have the Custom Design feature to edit the CSS. I’m glad you mentioned it, though; we’ll consider an option like that for the future!
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Thanks for the reply Payton … Marianne
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This is good news! My creative options are now expanded.
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Finally, a much awaited update.
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What a great addition and a lovely surprise! Thank you. I’ve changed my fonts and my site looks much clearer and more modern. Well done!
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Thanks for this – a good, helpful addition!
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This is a great idea. I would have preferred to be able to just change the site title as I am not sure if I like the change to the other headings in the side bar when using a fancy font. I am using 2015 and I read the other comments re relative size.
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Thank you for the suggestion! We’re trying to keep the number of options small so the fonts are easy to use, but we’re always considering the next idea!
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Error message on all my computers reads “customizer failed to load – try again?
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At the moment this feature is only available to sites hosted on WordPress.com, but Jetpack-enabled sites like http://www.forexretrace.com may be supported in the future! If you’re having trouble visiting the Customizer from within the WordPress.com interface, you should be able to visit it directly at the wp-admin URL.
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This is a wonderful initiative! Thanks a million times. I and many others were waiting for this upgrade.
I hope some CSS features will also become free in future.
Love you WordPress!
❤ 🙂
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i take it, that the fonts available wholly depend on the the theme you are using. I’m using Penscratch (at the moment) and don’t seem yo see that many fonts available.
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The available fonts are actually the same for every theme, although how they are applied definitely varies for each theme. Right now there are 34 Google fonts available for all sites and the already-existing 43 Typekit fonts for sites with the Custom Design feature. We may release more in the future. Is there any font in particular you’d like to see?
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Is any of these fonts using ligatures? I haven’t found one, so far.
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That’s a good question. Not many of the Google fonts support ligatures, but a few of them do like Lato and Playfair Display. However, browser support for ligatures is a little limited and depending on the theme you may need to turn on ligature support using Custom CSS (available with the Custom Design feature).
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Thanks for helping me.
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Nice! Thanks WordPress!!
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I was unable to edit “my” (the sample) “first post” to see how a full alphabet would look with these typefaces. However, the one I was hoping for, which I believe is called GOTHIC (It’s all capitals, larger for the capitals, and smaller for the minuscules) was not one of the choices, alas.
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Thanks for the suggestion! I couldn’t find that particular font in the available fonts from Google, could you look there and see if you can find the name?
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Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
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Finally! You guys should’ve done this in the first place. Now I can customize my blogs anyway I want to. Happy at last!
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Thank you very much for this update! It gave my blog that is using an old template (The Redoable Lite) a more updated look! I’m just curious why the size goes from ‘Normal’ to ‘Large’ without a ‘Medium’ in between. I would’ve wanted a bigger font size but ‘Large’ is just too large!
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Thanks for the suggestion! We’ll consider adding some more size options to the list!
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Very interesting! I’ve tried a couple of times to see the possibility of using google fonts on my WordPress blog, but it seemed to be requesting for some CSS requirements. Really glad to hear about this improvement. Well done guys!
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Loved it when I tried it on my work pc. Saved it, but on my home pc everything still shows up with the original font even though the dashboard says I’ve changed them. Any idea what the cause could be?
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I checked the site dinnerfornone.wordpress.com and I see the Monserrat font being rendered for the site-title. It could be that when you visited the site from home there was some delay downloading the font from Google. Could you check again?
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I just found the culprit – I seem to have blocked something via Firefox Lightbeam; have disabled Lightbeam and now all the fonts show up properly. Thank you for following up!
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Our previous limitation when it came to font changes re: the requirement for CSS editing upgrades was an annoyance to me, but now I’m having fun making font selections for my blogs. Woo hoo! Thanks so much for this great addition to our free features. I appreciate it very much.
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Reblogged this on one cool site and commented:
I have not been inclined to purchase custom design upgrades for my blogs and the requirement for CSS editing upgrades was an annoyance to me. However, I’m having a great time now trying out new font selections for each blog. If you haven’t tried out this new free feature for WordPress.com blogs, why not head over to the customizer and give it a whirl?
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Thanks for the new font choices. It was super easy to apply them. With a couple of minutes of effort, my blog has a fresh look.
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Reblogged this on Crafted and commented:
This is about to fix a bunch of stuff on multiple blogs for me! Excited!
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This is a nice idea, but as is it’s pretty much useless. Because there are only two categories (Headings and Base Font), changing the style/size in one place also changes it in a bunch of other unexpected places. So like, if you want “Huge” post titles, you end up with equally huge menu links, widget titles or commenter usernames, depending on the theme.
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It’s true that in order to keep the controls easy to use, we’ve limited the number of settings. It’s still possible to have fine-grained control over every aspect of a theme’s fonts using the Custom CSS controls included in the Premium and Business plans. That said, we’re always experimenting with other options, so thank you for the comment!
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I had a blast playing with this last week but it seems not to work today. I can change the fonts in the customizer, save the settings, but the blog doesn’t change. There is another user in the forum reporting the same thing.
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I took a look at swrightboucher.wordpress.com and I see that you are previewing the Premium Plan so you can see the additional Typekit fonts (you have Proxima Nova and Skolar chosen, which are both from the paid plan). Those fonts won’t actually be displayed on your site unless you purchase the plan.
If you want to use custom fonts without the upgrade, you can use any of the Google fonts (those without the [Tk] logo) for free!
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Thank you! I hadn’t realized. I’ll go play with the Google fonts.
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Google fonts are a great resource! thank you for the helpful article.
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Thank you – you are the best 🙂 Free Google fonts are great message 🙂
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