Google Fonts are widely used by many websites to enhance their typography and overall design. With a vast selection of free font families available, Google Fonts have been viewed trillions of times, showcasing their popularity.
While externally hosting Google Fonts offers convenience, it also presents certain challenges. Firstly, these fonts are among the heaviest third-party resources to load, adding to the page weight and requiring additional HTTP requests. This can significantly impact website performance, especially when multiple font families with various weights are loaded.
The idea of self-hosting Google Fonts locally may seem appealing as a solution to potentially improve website loading times. However, font optimization is complex, and self-hosting can introduce difficulties when it comes to optimizing overall performance.
In this article, we will explore the basics of web fonts, including Google Fonts, and delve into the process of hosting them locally. Additionally, we will assess whether self-hosting truly makes a difference to website performance.
Understanding Web Fonts
Web fonts are fonts specifically designed for displaying text on websites. In the past, developers were limited to a set of web-safe fonts that came bundled with major operating systems. However, the @font-face rule introduced in CSS3 allowed for the use of custom fonts, revolutionizing web design by providing more creative possibilities.
Google Fonts: A Comprehensive Catalog
Google Fonts is a vast catalog of free, open-source fonts that empower web designers and developers to create visually appealing websites with excellent typography. With web fonts available for over 135 languages, Google Fonts not only ensures proper licensing but also handles hosting and delivery. It essentially functions as a font content delivery network (CDN), enabling easy integration by adding a single line of code to a website's headers.
Google Fonts and Website Performance
Google Fonts claims to optimize web page loading times by caching fonts across various sites. This means that each font only needs to load once, and subsequent requests for the same font can be served from the cache. Additionally, Google Fonts automatically selects the smallest font file format supported by the user's browser, such as WOFF 2.0, which offers superior compression.
However, when using Google Fonts on a website, the main stylesheet sends an HTTP request to fetch the Google Fonts stylesheet, resulting in additional requests to the fonts.gstatic.com domain where the fonts are hosted. While Google Fonts sets a low expiration time of 1 day for caching, some speed testing tools may consider this a performance issue and suggest self-hosting the fonts to increase expiration time and cache them for a longer period.
Self-Hosting Google Fonts: The Reality
Self-hosting Google Fonts locally on a WordPress site can be achieved using plugins like OMGF. This approach allows fonts to be downloaded to the webserver, generating a stylesheet for the downloaded fonts and adding it to the site's header. While self-hosting may appear to reduce DNS requests and leverage browser cache, speed test results indicate that it doesn't offer specific performance benefits.
Tests conducted with a dummy website using both Google Fonts and self-hosted fonts showed that serving fonts directly from the Google CDN was the fastest option. The results did not demonstrate significant performance advantages when self-hosting fonts.
The Advantages of Google Fonts
Google Fonts optimizes font delivery based on factors such as the user's device and browser. It selectively serves fonts with features like WOFF, Kerning, and Hints to compatible user agents, while utilizing the superior WOFF 2.0 compression standard for other cases. This reduces the font size and enhances loading times.
Google Fonts API dynamically downloads fonts based on the specific fonts required by a web page, eliminating unnecessary font loading. Achieving the same functionality when hosting fonts locally can be challenging.
Google Fonts incorporates cutting-edge web performance technologies and continuously introduces new font technologies to millions of websites effortlessly. This ensures that websites can benefit from advancements without additional implementation efforts.
Conclusion
While self-hosting fonts may initially seem like a viable approach to improve website performance, Google Fonts offers a comprehensive solution that leverages web performance techniques. Self-hosting web fonts involves complexities beyond simple downloading and hosting, making it less straightforward to optimize font delivery. Google Fonts eliminates these challenges and provides an efficient and reliable method for delivering fonts. Therefore, self-hosting Google Fonts is not generally recommended for most cases.
If you encounter difficulties or have further inquiries regarding Google Fonts and optimization, feel free to leave a comment for assistance.
Why Self-Hosting Google Fonts Isn’t Recommended?