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Simon Wicki
Simon Wicki

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at wicki.io

One Font Format to Rule Them All: WOFF2

Learn why WOFF2, and WOFF as a fallback, is the only font format you need.

If you’ve been around as a web developer for some time, you’ve seen these font formats in your CSS. Here’s an example for a self-hosted Raleway font:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Raleway';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  src: url('../fonts/raleway-v22-latin-regular.eot'); /* IE9 Compat Modes */
  src: local(''),
       url('../fonts/raleway-v22-latin-regular.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'), /* IE6-IE8 */
       url('../fonts/raleway-v22-latin-regular.woff2') format('woff2'), /* Super Modern Browsers */
       url('../fonts/raleway-v22-latin-regular.woff') format('woff'), /* Modern Browsers */
       url('../fonts/raleway-v22-latin-regular.ttf') format('truetype'), /* Safari, Android, iOS */
       url('../fonts/raleway-v22-latin-regular.svg#Raleway') format('svg'); /* Legacy iOS */
}
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Do we still need to support all 5 (!) of them? Where did they come from? How do they compare to each other?

These questions I’d like to answer in this post.


Timeline

Image description

It took time and iterations to have what we’ve ended up with.

With more efficient font formats, thanks to compression, browsers were able to support them.

Have a look at the elaborate Font Format Timeline by Pedro Amado. This shows, that there are in fact many more facets to font formats than we think.


Comparison

I’ll go ahead and use the following criteria for my score to compare font formats:

  • Browser support as of November 2021
  • File size (aka format efficiency)

For the file size I used Comic Sans Neue and the browser support I gathered from caniuse.com. Here’s the let’s have a look at the following table ordered historically with these criteria:

Font Format Release year Browser support File size Score
OTF/TTF 1985 98.6% 57 kb 69/100
SVG 2001 19.4% 113 kb 20/100
EOT 2007 0.87% 27 kb 43/100
WOFF 2009 98.6% 30 kb 88/100
WOFF2 2017 96.8% 23 kb 98/100

Let me explain why WOFF2 scored higher than WOFF in this comparison: It all comes down to the 7 kb in file size. Generally if your site shows the user content more quickly, your conversion will increase—even if the gain is only in the hundred millisecond range.

Your fonts could be:

  • blocking content from appearing (invisible text)
  • cause layout shifts
  • delay further assets from downloading on flaky mobile networks
  • sending bad signals to Google (LCP & CLS from Core Web Vitals)

How to convert

It's a very good idea to self host your fonts for performance reasons. I described one case in my Time to Say Goodbye to Google Fonts
post.

How to best convert a font type to WOFF2 and WOFF depends where you got your font type from:


Conclusion

WOFF2, and WOFF as fallback, is enough nowadays¹.

¹) if your site doesn't need support for antiquated browsers like IE8.


Simon Wicki is a Freelance Developer in Berlin. Worked on Web and Mobile apps at JustWatch. Fluent in Vue, Angular, React and Ionic. Passionate about Frontend, tech, web perf & non-fiction books.

👉 Join me on Twitter to follow my latest updates.

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