RL Digital

Most common internet browsers only support a limited number of fonts. A client wanted to emulate the look achieved by BBC’s Later site using Wordpress. That meant using SEO unfriendly images to replace the headings or dynamic font replacement. The latter is not only SEO friendly; it is also much easier to implement.

I looked at two WordPress plugins: Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR) for WordPress and Dynamic Font Replacement DFR4WP.

“Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR) for WordPress” seemed very promising. It is easy to implement and offers a wide-range of fonts that come with the plugin files. It is limited, however, to a single font replacing one or more tags of your choice. The main reason I abandoned it though, was a strange green highlighting showing up in IE8.

The “Dynamic Font Replacement DFR4WP” plugin did what I needed it to do without any artifacts in Internet Explorer. It has the added benefit that different fonts can be assigned to different tags. It conveniently installs a separate easy-to-find menu block in your WordPress Admin Panel sidebar. The only gotcha is that fonts can’t be uploaded directly to plugin admin panel. The fonts need to be converted here first. Once you figure that out, the rest is easy!

With either plugin, you will probably need to up-size your default heading font sizes to achieve the look you want.

You can see a very clever application of dynamic font replacement on this WordPress site.