I've used Google Fonts in prototypes and in 10M+ MAU products. It's incredibly easy to get started with and provides an amazing font discovery. Tha...
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So you still use google font, you only download them to your server right? What is the performance benefit here? Even the article you pointed to concluded that hosting google font locally does not yield any benefit. I can even argue that google connection can be faster than your own server in some cases.
The only thing that you can save is dns connect time which can be helped partially with preconnect. As stated in the article you linked yourself, google also has some nice tweaks built in on their server to detect and serve fonts better for users. Wouldn't it be way more complicated to do it yourself?
Hey yellow, I now updated the post. Thanks again and sorry for the confusion.
Hey yellow, I apologise I messed up the links 🙈. I still had it in my research list of not "enough data to back it up". Thanks for pointing this out, I will update it immediately!
Thank you. I'm very interested in all these performance topics. Do you see real improvement hosting your own fonts? Do you measure impacts with users using various browsers and devices?
On this article in your post, the wp rocket team seems to dismiss the idea that local fonts are faster. wp-rocket.me/blog/self-hosting-goo...
I'm very interested in these topics as well!
In the wp-rocket blog post, all replies disagree with the author in the comment section. The author also compares Google Fonts with CDN to self hosted fonts for repeated usage, which is comparing apples with pears.
Adding a CDN for your static assets like self-hosted fonts improves performance, definitely. Therefore I wouldn't compare this.
The benchmark data on the wp-rocket blog post never made any sense to me either: in one network chart I can clearly see that self-hosted fonts is being requested faster than the Google Fonts network chart. But the document-ready signal is later initiated, which could mean that their implementation of self-hosted fonts are blocking the render, whereas the Google Fonts use font-display swap.
You see, so many assumptions and questions that I rather not trust that data.
Sorry again for bringing that link into the conversation.
I guess I'd better follow up with a clean benchmark post myself! :)
Self-hosting fonts isn't recommended for performance reasons only, but also because it is better in regards to privacy and GDPR compliance.
BTW, recently, WordPress announced the Webfonts Loader project, which will eventually get its way to the core.
Thank you Giorgos for pointing this out, I fully agree. I'm glad to see WordPress going in this direction!
Great post, thanks!
One of the plugins I use to load web fonts in my Gatsby sites is no longer being maintained, and recently caused all my clients' websites to stop building properly. Will be moving them all over to self-hosted fonts ASAP.
There are an another cons with the self hosting approach. The total resource cost is more, if we're hosting the same content as someone else. (Well CDNs do this too, but that's their job)
The "global-font-bandwidth" (environmental footprint) is bigger because of the new caching policies, but same in the self hosted and in google hosted scenario (or smaller until every browser has the feature). You have to update the self hosted data regularly if something you need fixed or added in them.
And I don't see any pros. As already discussed, the UX benefits are questionable (if they exist at all). Well, thank you anyway.
Hi Simon. Your article once convinced me of saying bye to Google Fonts. Then I found the latest versions of Safari fail to render self-hosted fonts for preventing browser fingerprinting, which changed my mind to say, "Don't say good bye to Google Fonts (yet)." I've written an article on this point: dev.to/masakudamatsu/don-t-locally...
But I may miss something important. Let me know your thought if time allows.
Masa
Okay! I've stopped using Google Fonts.
Nice, thanks for the info, I wasn't aware!
Useful information, thanks! 🙏❤
Very insightful, thanks!