How-to · 6 min read
What font is this website using?
You land on a site, the typography looks great, and you want to know exactly what font it is — to use it yourself, or just out of curiosity. There are a few ways to find out, ranging from one click to a bit of detective work. Here they are, fastest first.
The fastest way: scan the site
Paste the site's URL into the fonts & colours scanner and it reads the site's stylesheets and lists the actual font families in use, filtering out the system fallbacks and icon fonts that clutter a manual search. In a few seconds you get the real typefaces — usually the headline font and the body font — without touching any code. This is the quickest route for most people.
Scan any site's fonts
Get the real typefaces in seconds.
The browser inspector way
If you want to identify the font on one specific piece of text, your browser's built-in inspector is perfect. Right-click the text you're interested in and choose "Inspect." In the panel that opens, look at the "Computed" styles and find font-family — it shows the exact font applied to that element. This is the most precise method when you care about one specific heading or button rather than the whole site, though it takes a little more clicking.
Browser extensions
There are dedicated font-identifier browser extensions that let you hover over any text to see its font, size, and weight. They're handy if you do this often. The trade-off is you have to install and trust an extension, whereas a web scanner or the built-in inspector needs nothing extra. For occasional use, the scanner or inspector is simpler; for daily design work, an extension can be worth it.
Identifying a font from an image
What if the font isn't live text but part of an image — a logo, a graphic? Then the methods above won't work, because there's no code to read. For that you need an image-based font identifier, where you upload a screenshot and it tries to match the shapes to known fonts. These are less reliable than reading live code, but they're the only option when the type is baked into a picture.
Live text on a page always has its font in the code — you just have to read it. Type baked into an image is a guessing game.
Why identify a site's fonts at all?
Beyond curiosity, it's genuinely useful. If you're building a brand, seeing the fonts that successful sites in your space use helps you make informed typography choices. If you're designing a store, matching the polish of sites you admire starts with understanding their type. You can't copy a site's actual assets, but fonts themselves are widely available — identifying one you love often means you can license and use the same font in your own project.
The quickest habit
Next time a site's type catches your eye, just scan it — you'll have the font names in seconds, along with the site's colour palette as a bonus. For a single specific element, use the browser inspector. Between those two free methods, you can identify almost any website's typography in under a minute.
Keep reading: how to find the fonts and colours a site uses, or what platform a website is built on.