WordPress 6.8’s April 2025 release refreshes the Style Book with a clearer structure and labels.1 It also makes the preview available to qualifying classic themes that support editor styles or include a theme.json file.
That is a useful prompt to inspect a website’s ordinary components together. The homepage can look beautifully consistent while the rest of the site is quietly holding a button convention.
For a fictional service website, put a primary action, secondary action, text link, form field and error message beside the heading and body styles. Use real content rather than ideal-length labels.
The first review might reveal:
- Two primary buttons with different padding and corner shapes.
- A supporting text style that becomes too faint on a light background.
- Form fields whose labels don’t follow the surrounding type hierarchy.
- Lists and captions that use spacing unrelated to the rest of the page.
None of these findings requires a dramatic redesign. They reveal where the system needs a clearer rule or a justified exception.
Follow the inconsistency back to its source
Is this a shared value or an isolated adjustment?
A button’s appearance can depend on several layers: theme settings, component styles, plugin styles and a local override. Changing the visible symptom without understanding that chain may simply create another override.
Design tokens give shared decisions names, such as the color used for a primary action or a standard spacing value. Brad Frost’s April 2025 discussion connects those values with the components they help form.3
For our sample site, a shared action color should be applied according to an agreed role. A token does not become useful merely because a developer has given a shade of blue an official title.
WordPress’s theme.json can provide global settings and styles, including palettes and typography. The exact implementation depends on the theme. The review should establish where the values are owned before changing them.
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Does the component survive its less attractive content?
Try a longer button label, a form error that wraps and a list with several lines per item. Check narrow screens, keyboard focus and text enlargement.
This is where a preview earns its keep. It reveals the states the homepage presentation may never have needed to show.
An error message should remain connected to the relevant field. A secondary action should remain recognizable without competing with the primary one. A caption should look related to its image rather than as though it has been accidentally left in the corridor.
The goal is dependable relationships, not identical dimensions. Some components need different spacing because they contain different information.
Pairs well with A useful design system can fit a small WordPress website.
Has the real website adopted the same rules?
The Style Book is a preview, not a guarantee that every custom template and plugin screen follows the same styles. Inspect representative live pages in the test environment after making changes.
An ACF-led theme may render custom sections with its own markup and styling. It can benefit from the same review method, but the Style Book will not automatically inventory every bespoke section.
For those parts, maintain a representative preview page or another practical collection of states. Include the actual fields, content variations and interactive behavior the theme supports.
I would keep this review available as the page count grows. It gives designers, developers and editors a common place to notice drift before the differences become a redesign project.
A new section can still have personality. It should borrow the established rules where they fit and introduce a new pattern only when the content needs one.
That leaves the team with fewer mysteries and a more coherent website. The primary button can get back to its own job, without maintaining three separate wardrobes.