Fixing Fonts appear as bold or do not load (Kirki issue)

Updated: 15th March 2024

A font rendering issue appeared this week within the Kirki plugin. Fonts now either appear all bolded, or in some cases, don’t render correctly at all, reverting to the browser defaults.

This appears to be due to how Kirki retrieves fonts from Google’s API. It looks for woff fonts rather than the woff2 type. Something has changed within Google’s API and the woff versions are not retrieved correctly.

Modify Kirki directly

This approach changes the core Kirki plugin to ensure that it retrieves woff2 files rather than woff.

Edit this file: july/inc/admin/kirki/modules/webfonts/class-kirki-fonts-downloader.php

Replace line 191 with this line:

$user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:73.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/73.0';

Next install the Transients Manager plugin.

And look for: kirki_remote_url_contents

And delete that transient. This has an expiry of 7 days so it will eventually flush by itself if you wait long enough.

Test the site now, and the fonts should display again.

You can remove the Transients Manager plugin afterwards.