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Fast Webfonts

Iain Bean shares some tricks on his blog to make your Webfonts faster.

Use the most modern file formats

Web Open Font Format 2.0 (WOFF2) is the smallest and most efficient file format for web fonts as of May 2021. Make sure it appears before older file formats as a browser will use the first font it understands. If you care about IE11 you’ll need WOFF as well. If you care about IE8 as well you’ll need TTF (or some other old format). You can use Online Font Converter to convert fonts (make sure to check the license first).

Use the font-display descriptor

Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT)
Text will be invisible until the font is downloaded.
Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT)
Text will be rendered in a fallback font until the font is downloaded.

Use font-display: swap; so browsers will use a fallback font until the webfont is loaded.

Preload your font files

Add the following tag to your head:

<link rel="preload" href="/some-font.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin="">

This forces the browser to start downloading the font before it knows it needs it. Otherwise the browser parses the CSS first, checks if the font is needed on the page and only then loads it.

Subset your font files

Tools like Glyphhanger can look at a list of pages and determine the Unicode character ranges that are used and will create a new version with only those characters included.

Self-host your fonts

Reasons not to self-host your fonts

  1. You often have no choice with a certain typefaces.
  2. It’s convenient, copy and paste a line of HTML and you’re done

Reasons to use self-host your fonts

Performance

Domain lookups take time. Even Google’s own sites (e.g. web.dev) use self-hosted fonts instead of Google Fonts.

Privacy

Paid-for web font services like Adobe Fonts collect data (thy need page views for billing, but they might collect more). If you have the choice, choose including CSS over JavaScript .

Control

With self-hosted fonts you can customize your fonts (i.e. subsetting, define font-display settings or specifying how long a font is cached).

Reliability

Third party services can suffer slowdowns or outages or even shut down. If you self-host, your fonts will work as long as your website works.