If you go into the Customizer under the Typography tab, you’ll find settings to modify heading styles (H2, H3, H4, H5, etc.). These settings are specifically coded to affect only standard headings, that is, headings inserted directly into your page content or added using the “Text Block” element.
These options will not affect headings used in builder elements (such as Heading, Icon Box, Feature Box, etc.) or entry headings found in archives, grid elements, or post cards.
Below is a screenshot showing the settings being referred to.
Why Don’t the Settings Affect Theme Elements?
This is intentional. Builder elements and post entries, like those in grids or archives, have their own design settings. You wouldn’t want the Customizer to override those styles, since they’re usually part of a specific layout or design element.
HTML heading tags (like H2, H3, etc.) are meant for SEO and content structure, not design. In blog posts, for example, heading tags are used to organize content and are expected to follow a consistent style. But in elements like Icon Boxes or Feature Boxes, headings are often styled differently to fit the design; larger fonts, more spacing, or unique formatting.
Keeping the Customizer settings limited to standard content headings helps maintain that distinction between structure and design.
For example, take a look at this demo blog post with some H2 and H3 heading tags. If the same font size and margin were applied to headings inside articles and those inside builder elements (like on this page), it would look really bad. That’s because you often use the same heading tags for SEO, but the design needs to be different depending on the context of the heading; such as an icon box vs a standard heading.
Heading tags are important for SEO and shouldn’t be used just for design purposes. Imagine you set up several pages with icon boxes using H3 tags for their headings, with a custom style for H3. At the same time, you have post grids and other elements using H2 tags, styled differently. If later you decide to swap all H3 tags to H2 for SEO reasons (or vice versa), you’ll run into design problems. Changing the heading tags will also change the design unless you also adjust the styles, which can mess up the appearance of your H2 headings site wide.
As you can see, managing all headings with the same Typography settings would become complicated. That’s why when you select heading tags for builder elements, you’re choosing the tag for SEO purposes, not to change its look.
What if I want the Typography Settings to affect the Heading element?
If you want to apply the typography settings to the “Heading” element you can actually go to Customize > WPBakery Builder and you will find a checkbox to enable that.
What if I want the Typography Settings to affect all my headings?
If you really want the typography settings to affect all headings on the site you can download the following plugin and activate it on the site:
What this plugin does is hook into the Customizer to alter the output of the typography settings. This is the exact code in the plugin if you wanted to take a look or just implement the code directly in your child theme functions.php file:
add_filter( 'wpex_typography_settings', function( $settings ) {
if ( isset( $settings['entry_h1'] ) ) {
$settings['entry_h1']['target'] = 'h1, .wpex-h1, .vcex-module h1, h1.vcex-heading';
}
if ( isset( $settings['entry_h2'] ) ) {
$settings['entry_h2']['target'] = 'h2, .wpex-h2, .vcex-module h2, h2.vcex-heading';
}
if ( isset( $settings['entry_h3'] ) ) {
$settings['entry_h3']['target'] = 'h3, .wpex-h3, .vcex-module h3, h3.vcex-heading';
}
if ( isset( $settings['entry_h4'] ) ) {
$settings['entry_h4']['target'] = 'h4, .wpex-h4, .vcex-module h4, h4.vcex-heading';
}
return $settings;
} );