Appearance → Customize → Design → General → Widths.
| Setting | Default | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Container width | 1170px | The most the site container ever grows to |
| Narrow (reading) width | 620px | The reading column used by the Narrow layout |
Both take any CSS length. A bare number is treated as pixels.
Container width
The cap on the whole site: header, footer and any layout that is not Narrow. On a wide monitor the page stops growing here and centres itself.
- 1170px — the default. Comfortable for a two-column layout with a 260px sidebar
- 1280 – 1400px — a wider magazine feel; suits a 4-column grid
- 960 – 1080px — tighter and calmer; a good match for a text blog with a sidebar
Values under 500px are ignored on desktop. That guard exists so a half-typed value cannot collapse the site while you are editing it in the Customizer.
Below the container width the container simply takes a percentage of the viewport — 96% on small screens, 94% on larger ones — so there is always a margin at the edges.
Narrow width
The reading column, used by the Narrow layout on the blog, posts and pages.
620px at a 16px base size is about 70 characters a line, which is where long-form reading is most comfortable.
- 560 – 620px — classic reading measure
- 680 – 760px — wider; raise the line height to about
1.6to compensate - Past 800px you are no longer reading, you are scanning, and should probably use the Full width layout instead
If you change the base font size, change this with it: measure is about characters per line, not pixels. An 18px base at 620px is a narrower measure than a 16px base at 620px.
What is not here
- Sidebar width and gap have their own group just below, because the divider that goes with them is not a length.
- The block editor’s widths come from
theme.jsonand are fixed at 620px content / 900px wide — see theme.json. Changing the narrow width here does not move the editor canvas.