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Create a Font-Perfect Blog Now!

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pecial Font on Wordpress Blog

I know it’s kind of a bore to stick to default WordPress fonts in your blog, especially if you’re someone like me who just can’t help customizing what could still be customized (every blogger does right?). So here’s the situation: you look at your blog and think, “geez, I wish I could use a special font on my blog to add in some bit of edge or personality or whatever”. Well, consider that problem solved because I’m here to show you how to do just that minus the wretched coding pains.

Oh, did I mention thank goodness for WordPress plugins?!

First stop, here’s why you ought to be interested in integrating special fonts in your blog.

Although WordPress is great by itself, it only allows you to work with a limited set of web-safe fonts. The reason for that is WP saves you the trouble of having your fonts (hence, your texts) possibly being unrecognized by browsers. Now, it’s perfectly alright to stay in that ‘safe zone’ of fonts especially if you’re okay with simple. But if you’re hard-headed at being extra creative, or adding that extra oomph to your blog appeal, then WordPress isn’t stopping you from using special fonts of your own.

Just a quick tip: While this tutorial will give you free reign to your fonts, I do advise that you use it sparingly because 1) it adds up a bit of loading time for your site and 2) you don’t really want to overwhelm your readers with fonts. It’s not recommended to be used on blog posts (even if, I think readability is a bigger concern on blog posts rather than aesthetic quality). Less is more. As for me, I personally just use special fonts only on the page title of my site pages as you can see below.

using special font for wordpress

The WordPress Plugin

I use AnyFont (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/anyfont/) as my plugin of choice. With AnyFont, it’s as simple as uploading your special font and then selecting which blog texts will be transformed with the special font/s. It’s practically a no-brainer.

Detailed instructions:

  1. Download and install the AnyFont plugin. I trust this wouldn’t even take you a minute 😉
  2. After you activate the plugin, you should now be able to see the AnyFont tab at the dashboard sidebar.
  3. There would be three tabs at the top: the Settings, Install Font, and Create Styles. Obviously, you need to upload the font of your choice first (would require a free sign up at FontServ). After that, head to Create Styles and define as many custom fonts as you want (varying font sizes etc).
  4. Once you have a predefined font style, head back to settings and you’ll see options and select which site texts should the font apply to. You can experiment from there.

What AnyFont does is to basically transform the text into an image version that uses the font (which explains why I told you it would add a bit of time to your site loading). Unlike other plugins out there that really uses the special font in your blog, this plugin might save you from the risk of encountering viewing troubles by just converting the text into an image.

Don’t Worry About SEO!

You might think that this will lower your SEO juice since you’re taking out the integral texts (like for headlines). It doesn’t. In fact, what it does is to transform the text into an SEO-compatible image so it’s as if you’re still having the text intact (it’s just not visible to your viewers).

A Bit of a Glitch?

I’m currently using AnyFont on my site (yeah I mentioned that) to customize my page titles. The downside is that it only seems to work for one-liner headings. When the title gets longer than the post body, the image created already overlaps. It’s not a bug, but it’s definitely something that needs to be refined by the plugin developer.

Other Plugins

Of course, there are many more plugins that allows you to do this. I just gave a walk-through with AnyFont since I just talk (write, rather) about what I use and experience for myself. Anyway, if that doesn’t seem to suit you, you should also check out plugins such as TypeKit (the more popular plugin but only free up to 2 fonts, also recently acquired by Adobe) and Font Burner Control Panel (allows 1000+ fonts but only those found at the plugin authors’ website).

Well, that’s it! Let me know if you have questions, or even better, more suggestions!

About

I created the Blog Design Team. It's the blogosphere's premium design service destination if you haven't heard ;) I currently specialize in helping amazing people kickstart with a wicked logo.

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{ 23 Responses }

  1. Anne Preston says:
    Useful info - Thanks!
  2. Gumbumper says:
    I've never tried different fonts, but I may just have to try it. Thanks for sharing this good information.
  3. Jasmin says:
    I've been looking for this plug-in since ages. I like to customize my blog's font.. Thanks to this! :)
  4. Maja says:
    I agree with the tips in the post but installation of too many plug-ins on a blog increase load time of the site that sure lower the ranking of the site.
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      Many people miss understand this point! There are good plugins that help you cache your blog, so you don't have to worry about it that much! Just an opinion!
      • Liane says:
        Exactly. WP Minify is a good example :)
  5. Toycel says:
    I think that customisation in a blog is important. It is good to see a different font or a different theme/layout to those that are out there. Most of the bloggers that have hundreds of sites have the same theme on each site and it just looks terrible. Altering the styles, layout using the CSS and other areas of the site are a good idea to personalise the site and keep your readers wanting to return.
  6. Barry says:
    I think any plugin like this that gives us control of our little internet real estate is a great thing. But, just like anything else, that control needs to used intelligently. Without a proper understanding of what you're doing has the potential to do more harm than good. Caution is definitely appropriate. Thanks for the great information!! ~Barry
  7. Mark says:
    I think I may give it a try Liane. Sounds interesting. I would love to make all of my blog posts look like squeeze pages. I son't know why, it just sounds cool. Thanks for the suggestion...:) Mark
    • Liane says:
      Make blog posts look like squeeze pages? Hmmn. Definitely an interesting concept right there. I think you just need a good theme designer to pull that effect off :D
  8. Jason says:
    I second Paul's concern about replacing "crawl-able" text. I haven't personally done an analysis, but it seems that it should be addressed.
  9. Tushar says:
    I try to keep my blog simple without too much of hustle bustle. This keeps things calm and effective
  10. Steve says:
    As you pointed out, special fonts can be a tricky thing. While the school funds may make your blog look really cool is it worth it to potentially limit your readers. If a font does not convert this completely worthless so house bestial a font is has to be balanced with the fact that may not be readable on all systems, as you did point out. An easier option in funds to give your blog a different look is "justification" This will give it a more even looking style than typical paragraphs. This can be specifically good for "news" type articles since most readers are custom to newsprint being justified. But even here is something that bloggers have to use with caution, since justification is not natural to the readers I and many people subconsciously like the uneven breaks as it helps them to find their place when scanning text.
    • Liane says:
      Right on Steve :) Though I think the readability issue is another topic altogether. Right now this post just concerns design aesthetics if bloggers wants to have better control on the feel of your design thru customizing fonts. I'll definitely touch that topic soon. Thanks!
  11. Paul Salmon says:
    By replacing some of the heading text with images, won't this have any impact on SEO? While I know that the ALT and TITLE tags are populated by the plugin, but I am wondering if the fact that the headings are no longer text if it will have an impact on SEO.
    • Liane says:
      What the plugin (that I recommended) does is to replace the text to a word image and attach the title attribute to the image. Personally, I haven't experienced this affecting my SEO juice as the pages which I use special fonts still end up in page 1 searches regardless. That's just me though. Hopefully that applies to others too :)
      • Jamie Northrup says:
        I was using a plugin a while back like this one (maybe it was this one I can't remember) but I was told to remove it because it affected my SEO, apparently search engines don't give as much significance to image title tags as H1 tags. Honestly I don't know much about SEO, but this is what a so-called specialist told me.
  12. Jeanie says:
    I think that installing and using this plugin can be very useful for me! thanks a lot for giving such a well-grounded description
  13. Chadrack says:
    I think this is really a great idea especially since I've been dreaming of using custom fonts. However, that caveat about loading time is putting me off.I think I don't want to add more load to my blog. Thanks for sharing this any way.
  14. Danny says:
    I am new to Word Press and I was wondering why there was no built in option to change font. At first I thought I was missing the icon and searched all over multiple times! Mystery solved! Thanks!
    • Liane says:
      Glad to be of help Danny :)
  15. Louis says:
    Agree. A follow up post about suggestions to make a blog readable (spacing, background-font colour, margins, etc) will be great.
    • Liane says:
      Noted Louis! Will be making one in the future. I'll collect my sources first, do some research and hopefully get it published soon here at FamousBloggers :)