Text, border and selection colours
Appearance → Customize → Design → General → Colors, unless noted.
The global palette
| Setting | Default | Reaches |
|---|---|---|
| Accent color | #4c9c66 |
Buttons and accents |
| Base text color | #000000 |
Body copy, and everything that follows it |
| Heading color | empty | h1–h6. Empty follows the base text colour |
| Link color | #4c9c66 |
The link styles that name a colour |
| Border color | #e0e0e0 |
Every hairline — see below |
| Selection text color | #000000 |
Text the visitor has selected |
| Selection background | #ffffdd |
The highlight behind it |
| Background Color | white | The page. Core’s own setting, folded in here |
| Background Image | — | Core’s, with its position/size/repeat controls |
Base text colour
Pure black on white is high contrast and slightly harsh over a long article. Many
blogs prefer something around #1a1a1a or #222222: still far past AA, visibly
softer. Try it before dismissing it.
Heading colour
Empty means headings follow the body text. Fill it in when you want headings to sit a shade darker or lighter than the copy — or in a brand colour, which works better on headings than it does on body text.
Border colour
One setting for every 1px line the theme draws: horizontal rules, Separator blocks, table cells, the search panel, the scroll-to-top button, the header and footer borders, and the sidebar divider.
It is one picker rather than one per surface because a page whose tables and horizontal rules disagreed about the colour of a hairline would just look broken.
The featured image border falls back to this too, when Design → Blog leaves its own colour empty.
#e0e0e0 is a light grey. Go darker for a more drawn, structured look; go lighter
(#ededed) for something that barely registers.
Selection colours
What a visitor sees when they drag across your text. The pale yellow default is deliberate — it looks like a highlighter rather than like the browser’s default blue.
This colour is also the highlighter stripe in the Text color, highlighter
marker link style, so changing it changes
both. That is intentional: it is the site’s “marked” colour.
Background colour and image
Core’s own custom-background controls, folded into this section rather than left stranded in a section of their own.
The background colour is not just the page: the header and footer read it too, so on the Light skins changing it repaints all three at once.
The three listing colours
Under Design → Blog, with the elements they colour:
| Setting | Reaches | Empty means |
|---|---|---|
| Post title color | Listing titles, and a Query Loop’s | Follow the heading colour |
| Meta color | The meta line and its relatives | Follow the text colour |
| Excerpt color | The summary under a title | Follow the text colour |
All three empty by default. A common, tidy combination: leave the title alone,
mute the meta to a grey around #767676, mute the excerpt slightly less. That
gives a listing three legible levels without introducing a colour.
Everything previews live
Colour changes are painted into the Customizer preview as you pick them, with no reload. Nothing is saved until Publish.