How to find out what font a website is using
Three ways to identify a website's font in under a minute: your browser's DevTools, an extension, or a font matcher for images. Plus what to do once you've found it.
You see a headline, the type is perfect, and you need to know what it is. Here’s how, from quickest to most thorough.
1. DevTools (no install, 30 seconds)
Works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc and Firefox.
- Right-click the text and pick Inspect.
- In Chrome: go to the Computed tab and scroll to the very bottom. Under Rendered Fonts you’ll see the font that’s actually on screen, and how many characters use it.
- In Firefox: click the Fonts tab in the Inspector. It lists every font used on the page, with a preview.
Why “Rendered Fonts” and not the font-family line? Because font-family is a wish list: “use Inter, and if that’s missing, Helvetica, and if that’s missing, Arial”. Rendered Fonts tells you which one won.
Safari has the same info: Develop → Show Web Inspector, select the text, and look under Font in the details sidebar.
2. An extension (one click, forever)
WhatFont and similar extensions let you hover any text and see the font, size, weight, line height and colour. Faster than DevTools if you do this a lot, and friendlier if DevTools makes your eyes glaze over.
3. It’s in an image
DevTools can’t help when the text is a picture: a logo, a poster, a screenshot someone sent you.
- WhatTheFont from MyFonts. Upload the image, it finds the letters and suggests matches.
- Font Squirrel’s Matcherator. Same idea, leans towards free fonts.
Both work best with a clean, straight crop of a few big letters. They’re guessing, so check the suggestions against the image letter by letter (the lowercase “a”, “g” and “y” are usually the giveaways).
Custom fonts, and why you can’t find them
Big brands often use a font made just for them. Airbnb has Cereal, Netflix has Netflix Sans, Spotify moved to its own Spotify Mix. You can’t buy those.
What you can do: search “[font name] alternative” or look at what the font was based on. Most custom fonts are close cousins of a commercial one, and a designer on Reddit has almost always already asked.
Once you’ve found it
- Check the licence. Free on Google Fonts (usually the SIL Open Font License) means free to use. A foundry font means you need a licence for web, and sometimes a separate one for apps or ads.
- Save it with where you saw it. The font on its own is half the reference. The font in use (the size, the spacing, what it’s paired with) is the part you’ll want to copy.
- Save the pairing. Most good type on the web is two fonts. Note both.
In Savepad, a Google Fonts link or a font file you’re allowed to keep opens as a type tester: every weight, your own sentence, side by side. Save the page it was on next to it, tag them #type, and your swipe file has type in it that you can actually use. There’s more on how designers use Savepad on the designers page.