Restore your original typography by adding custom CSS to override the new defaults.
Probably your theme’s custom typography are being overridden by new global typography rules.
Thanks Bozhana I’ve just read about the new global typography rules. The problem is I have 40+ websites all using the same theme. I don’t want to have go through all of them updating the typography with CSS.
You can download the theme.json or stylesheet file from any theme directory, add fixed typography (in theme.json), or add a CSS rule inside the stylesheet. Then replace the original file in the directory.
If you update the theme everything will be lost.
The best practice is to make child theme and putt stylesheet or theme.json there.
Adding the following to custom CSS seems to be a ‘quick fix’.
body {
font-family: "Your font here", serif !important;
font-size:1em!important;
}
With this code you will set the font-family, which will apply to all content.
The font size set in this way
body {
font-size:1em!important;
}
applies only to text that is not placed in tags. The font size must be defined for different tags.
Thank you again Bozhana. I understand exactly what you’re saying and how CSS works. Every one of my websites (40+) has a child theme.
I have informed the guys who make my theme builder and they are updating the builder asap to fall into line with the WP changes.
Can you please elaborate on:
Probably your theme’s custom typography are being overridden by new global typography rules.
Where’s the updated docs for this? I can’t find them anywhere.
Thanks in advance.
Hi sw33t, I honestly don’t remember exactly where I read it. Possibly ChatGPT when looking for a solution. I have since been in touch with the team that built my theme builder and they are implementing a fix. I guess I should have gone to them in the first place instead of WordPress.
Here’s what I found with a search…
Key Typography Updates in WordPress 6.9
- Typography Inheritance for Buttons: Buttons can now inherit typography styles (font style, text transform, letter spacing, font weight) from their parent elements and global styles defined in
theme.json. This change helps maintain a consistent design system across the entire site without needing custom CSS for every button.
- Global Styles for Form Elements: Developers can now use
theme.json to define colors, borders, and typography for various form elements, including text inputs and select/dropdown menus. This ensures search forms, comment forms, and other plugin-generated forms automatically match the site’s global design.
- “Fit Text” (Stretchy Text) Option: A new typography option in Heading and Paragraph blocks allows text to automatically adjust its font size to fill the width of its container. This provides responsive typographic control, which is especially useful for creating dynamic headers and hero sections that look polished on all screen sizes.
- Stylesheet Optimization: The update includes performance improvements in how stylesheets are handled, such as better minification and inlining. WordPress now also loads block CSS only when a specific block is used on a page, reducing unused code and page weight.
- Improved Font Handling: The system for managing and loading fonts is simpler and more efficient, contributing to faster page render times and overall site performance.
For Theme Developers and Designers
These changes strengthen the customization power within the Site Editor and theme.json, reducing the reliance on custom CSS. If existing custom themes experience styling conflicts due to the new defaults, developers can use a child theme or the custom CSS feature to override the new global rules. More information for developers is available on the WordPress Developer Resources blog.
Hi @russwcm is https://www.welshfoodanddrink.wales/ the site that broke for you?
In inspecting the styles for that site, I see that it bundles the default global-styles stylesheet. To my knowledge, the only change that has happened in WordPress 6.9 in this area is a fix for bug with button styles https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/60403 But your site is unaffected by that change because it doesn’t use blocks.
I’m also unaware of any other “new global typography rules”, and I’d happy to understand more what happened in case there’s a bug somewhere we need to fix.
Hi @oandregal it wasn’t that site but another which was built with Themify Builder. The Themify team are addressing the issue.
The site in question was hiddenhistory.co.uk and that also does not use blocks. Luckily I updated on staging environment. The 6.9 update stopped rendering the correct body font (I was using a Google Font and it was rendering ‘apple-system’ font or the like) and all fonts sitewide were larger than had been set.
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This reply was modified 6 months, 1 week ago by
russwcm.
Where’s the updated docs for this? I can’t find them anywhere.
I can’t find this sentence anywhere either. The pinned post here in the forum contains some basic links for the new WP 6.9 release: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/read-this-first-wordpress-6-9/
There are also the release notes: https://wordpress.org/news/2025/12/gene/
And here is the field guide, which, to my knowledge, should contain everything: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2025/11/25/wordpress-6-9-field-guide/
For any issues, it would be great if you could describe them as accurately as possible so that we can reproduce them. You can then open a ticket in Core Trac so that a developer can take a look at it. Here in this topic, it would be great if we could stick with the project started by @russwcm.
If you @russwcm use Themify, then unfortunately we can’t help you much here in the forum. This is a commercial theme that is not available to anyone here to reproduce your problem. You have already contacted Themify support, which is exactly the right thing to do. Please report back here with the results.
Hi @threadi I will give you what feedback I can when the next update is available.
Thanks for the responses… the selective loading of block styles from theme.json threw me off… and some of the font sizes are inheriting… from… somewhere… as stated above the !important declaration has solved this temporarily. (I’m using a custom theme)
I’m investigating a bit more and noticed a related thread here https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-6-9-broke-site-layout-crewbloom/ I wonder if it’s related.
@sw33t @russwcm would you be able to add this (as per this recommendation) in your affected sites to see if that fixes it?
add_filter( 'should_load_separate_core_block_assets', '__return_false' );
I’d like to understand if this is another instance of the same issue.
@oandregal
I only have 4 so far (thankfully!!!), and I’ve used this to load the blocks I needed. The only font-size issue I’ve run into after loading this was with the pull quote, and I ran out of time troubleshooting it so I just used !important on that one.
add_action(
'wp_enqueue_scripts',
function () {
wp_enqueue_style( 'wp-block-cover' );
}
);
