You have seen it on your own church site. A pastoral welcome that ends on a single dangling word. A three-line devotional caption where the last line is one word — "us." — sitting alone under the rest of the sentence. Nothing is broken, but the eye trips.
CSS finally has a native fix. It is called text-wrap: pretty, and in 2026 every browser your congregation uses supports it.
We wrote earlier about text-wrap: balance for headings. Balance evens out line length so a two-line hero title does not collapse into a stacked five-and-one. pretty is its quieter sibling — meant for body copy, where balance would be too expensive and where the real problem is the last line, not the whole paragraph.
What it actually does
The browser looks at the last few lines of a paragraph and works harder to avoid a widowed word — a lone fragment on its own line. It also improves hyphenation on the tail of long paragraphs. You get slightly tighter, more comfortable reading without touching a single word of your copy.
Where to add it
Most church sites are built on a shared body style. Adding pretty in one place cascades everywhere reading happens — bulletin summaries, sermon descriptions, staff bios, event copy, blog posts.
p, li, blockquote, .prose {
text-wrap: pretty;
}
That is it. No plugin, no build step, no measurable performance cost.
If your CMS wraps sermon transcripts or long articles in a container class (Tailwind's prose, for example, or WordPress's entry-content), add it there too. Long-form ministry content is where widowed words feel worst.
Where to skip it
Leave it off headings — use balance there. Skip it inside table cells and form inputs where visual density matters more than reading rhythm. And do not bother on giant marketing paragraphs that already fit on one line.
Why bother
Nobody will email you to say your paragraphs feel better. But the visitor who read your "What to Expect on Sunday" page all the way through is a little more likely to click the next link, and a little less likely to bounce because the copy felt cluttered. That is what good typography does — it clears the road so the message can travel.
If your church website's body copy still feels crowded or awkward on phones, we can take a quick look. Small type changes often do more than a full redesign.