How to Increase Font Size on Any Website Without Zooming the Whole Page

Zooming makes everything bigger, including images and menus, which can push pages out of shape. If you only want larger text, Chrome has a few options, each with limits.

Chrome's font size setting

Open Settings → Appearance → Font size and choose Large or Very large. This raises the default text size. It works on sites that use the browser's default size and scale from it, but many sites set fixed sizes, and those won't change.

Minimum font size: the strongest fix

Under Settings → Appearance → Customize fonts, drag Minimum font size up. Chrome then refuses to show any text smaller than that, on every site, even ones with fixed sizes. Start around 14 or 16 and adjust. Some tightly designed pages may wrap text differently, but most stay readable.

Reading mode for articles

Chrome's Reading mode (in the side panel, or right-click → Open in reading mode) shows an article's text alone, at the size, font and spacing you choose. The page itself isn't changed, so nothing breaks. It works best on articles and blog posts.

Custom styles for specific sites

For full control, a style extension like Stylus applies your own CSS. For example, to enlarge paragraph text on one site:

p, li { font-size: 20px !important; line-height: 1.6 !important; }

You can set different rules per site, and nothing else on the page grows.

Bigger text while focusing

ADHD Reading Focus shows a page one paragraph at a time and has its own font size control, so the paragraph you're reading can be larger than the rest of the page.

When zoom is the better choice

If menus, buttons and links are also too small, page zoom is better, because it keeps the layout in proportion. Set a default under Settings → Appearance → Page zoom, or zoom single sites with Ctrl and +; Chrome remembers each site's level.

Find a site's current text size

To see what size a site is using before you change things, Font Detector shows the font, size and weight of any text you click. For spacing as well as size, see how to customize line spacing and font size in Chrome.