How to Change Paragraph Spacing on Squarespace, Line Spacing in CSS Style 2026

Sign in at squarespace.com and pick the site from your dashboard. Spacing set through Site Styles is global: it applies to every element that uses the Paragraph text style, which includes plenty of things beyond body copy, since many blocks inherit their type from it by default.

That's exactly what you want for consistency, but it also means a bad value shows up everywhere at once. If you run more than one site on the account, confirm you opened the right one before dragging anything. From the dashboard, click Edit to open the page editor, since the styling panel lives inside the editor rather than in account settings.

Inside the editor, look at the toolbar across the top of the preview. Alongside the desktop and mobile view toggles is a paintbrush icon — that's Site Styles.

Clicking it slides a panel in from the right with the site-wide design controls: Fonts, Colors, Buttons, Animations, and so on, grouped under what Squarespace calls Global Font Styles. Everything in this guide happens under Fonts, so open that section first. Note the desktop and mobile icons in the same toolbar; you'll want them shortly, since spacing that reads well on a wide screen often falls apart on a phone.

Under Fonts you'll find your text groups broken out separately: Headings, Paragraphs, Buttons, and so on. Choose Paragraphs to control body copy.

The panel gives you Font, Weight, Style, Line Height, Letter Spacing, and Text Transform, with a Size section underneath holding Paragraph 1, 2, and 3. Line Height and Letter Spacing are the two sliders that matter for spacing, and both are measured in em, so they scale with font size instead of being locked to pixels. That's why a value that looks right at one size usually still looks right once you bump the text up.

Line height is the vertical gap between lines within a paragraph, and it does more for readability than font size does. For body text, somewhere between 1.4em and 1.7em is comfortable for most fonts.

Below about 1.3em, lines start to collide and the eye loses its place returning to the left margin; near 0em, Squarespace's own guidance warns lines can overlap outright, especially on mobile. Pushing it far higher, as in the 2.3em setting shown above, does the opposite damage: the lines stop reading as one paragraph and start looking like a list. Drag the slider slowly and watch a real paragraph of your own copy in the preview, not a heading, since headings and body text need different values.

Letter spacing controls the horizontal gap between individual characters. On paragraphs it should stay almost invisible — anything past roughly 0.05em starts to slow reading down noticeably, because the words stop holding together as shapes.

A negative value is riskier still: Squarespace's own guidance is to keep letter spacing at 0 or higher, since negative values can cause characters to overlap, particularly on mobile. Where letter spacing genuinely earns its place is on headings and small caps, and that lives in the Headings panel instead of Paragraphs. Open Headings the same way and you get the same set of controls for your display type, including Text Transform, which is how you get an uppercase heading style with generous tracking without retyping any text.

Extra line height and letter spacing cost horizontal and vertical room, and phones have far less of both. A heading that fits on two tidy lines at desktop width can wrap to four on a phone once you widen the tracking, and generous line height on paragraphs can push your call-to-action well below the fold.

Switch to the mobile view with the phone icon in the top toolbar and scroll through a text-heavy page before you commit. Squarespace scales type down on small screens automatically, but that doesn't rescue a layout you've deliberately stretched.

Click SAVE in the top-left of the editor to publish the change; until you do, everything is just a preview. The undo arrow next to SAVE steps back through your edits if you've gone too far.

For most sites the built-in sliders are the whole answer, and they're safer than code because they survive template updates. Reach for Custom CSS only when you need something the panel can't express: spacing on one specific block, a different line height on a single page, or spacing that changes at a particular breakpoint. In that case, target the block's own ID instead of a global paragraph selector, so your override doesn't quietly fight the Site Styles setting everywhere else.