The styles feature in WordPress isn’t about reinventing CSS – it’s about solving the massive problems with how we manage CSS in WordPress. Traditional themes face overwhelming complexity with multiple CSS files, dependency management, and constant style conflicts.
Classic WordPress sites often load 9+ CSS files on the frontend and 40+ in the admin, most of which aren’t even used on the current page. You’re constantly undoing default styles, maintaining separate frontend and editor stylesheets, and dealing with plugin conflicts.
The WordPress style engine solves this by consolidating all styling decisions into a unified system. Blocks declare their default styles, themes override these through theme.json, and user customizations take precedence. WordPress merges everything and outputs optimized CSS for both frontend and backend.
This revolutionary approach eliminates dependency headaches, reduces unused CSS, maintains consistent styling across contexts, and future-proofs your styles against WordPress core changes. It’s dramatically less work and far more reliable than traditional CSS management.