How to Use the Easy Google Fonts Plugin for WordPress

One of the limitations of working with the web are the number of fonts that you can use with your website. This can be resolved by working with your CSS code, but how do you quickly resolve on a WordPress site? Luckily, one of the easiest ways to resolve this is to use a plugin. Google is very generous in letting you freely use a large library of fonts on their Google fonts site. These fonts can be accessed manually, but also by plugins which make it much easier since you don’t have to modify CSS or other back end files. This article will be using the Easy Google Fonts plugin

by Sunny Johal and Amit Kayasth (Titanium Themes). The plugin has been updated to work with the latest version of WordPress and is highly rated with great functionality for using the fonts. We will show how to quickly load and then use the plugin to incorporate Google Fonts into your WordPress site.

Loading the Plugin

1. Login to the WordPress Dashboard
2. Click on Plugins in the menu at left
3. Click on Add New
4. In the top right hand corner, type in “Easy Google Fonts” in the search bar. Make sure to select the plugin by Titanium Themes
    
5. Click on the Install Now button, then click on Activate Plugin after it finishes installing
    

Using Easy Google Fonts

Using Google Fonts through the Easy Google Fonts plugin is very simple and is done through the Customizer of the WordPress Administrator. We will demonstrate how to use this in the customizer by demonstrating how it affects the fonts in your WordPress site. Note that site title is not necessarily directly affected by the plugin.

1. Login to the WordPress Dashboard
2. Click on Appearance, then click on Customize. Or, in the menu at top, click on Visit Site, then click on Customize in the top menu.
3. You will notice that there is a newly added menu item called Typography. Note that this option may differ from theme to theme. This tutorial uses the default Twenty-sixteen theme. Click on Typography.
    
4. Like the style sheets in other websites, fonts can be controlled by the sections of the page. For example, in the Twenty-sixteen theme, these sections include: Paragraphs, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, Heading 5, and Heading 6. For this tutorial, we’re going to alter the “Heading 1” font so that we can see how it immediately impacts the site. Click on the drop-down arrow next to Edit font for Heading 1. Try changing several of the headers, then create a test post and look at the different headers to see the effect. Note that the Site title may be controlled by the theme so the change does not affect this font.
    
5. You can also click on the Appearance tab or the Positioning tab to change the color and position of the text. If you have your WordPress site set to show Posts (instead of a static page), you can watch the changes to the fonts happen dynamically.
    
6. Once you have finished making your font changes, click on SAVE and PUBLISH in order to save your changes.

That completes the tutorial on how to install and use the Easy Google Fonts plugin. It’s great for making quick font changes to your posts and pages. Keep in mind that some fonts on the site are not directly affected by the plugin. You can however make custom font controls that allow you make these changes, but you will need to be familiar with the CSS that controls the theme’s fonts. For information check out the developer’s video.

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