A Practical Guide to Google Fonts for Production Websites
Google Fonts is free and huge, but loading fonts wrong will slow your site and frustrate users. Here is the workflow I use on every project. I have used Google Fonts on every web project for the past five years, and I have made most of the mistakes there are to make. Font loading seems simple until you measure its impact on real users, at which point it becomes one of the most consequential performance decisions on your site. Here is the workflow I have settled on after years of tweaking, testing, and occasionally breaking things in production. Choosing Fonts That Load Fast The first decision is which fonts to use, and performance should factor in from the start. Variable fonts are larger files than static fonts, but they replace multiple weight files with one. If you need three weights, a variable font is often smaller in total than three separate static files. If you only need one weight, a static font is smaller. I check the file size of every font before committing to it in a design. Google Fonts shows file sizes in the font details, and the range is wide. A lightweight body font might be thirty kilobytes per weight, while a display font with extensive character coverage can be two hundred kilobytes or more. For body text, I stay under fifty kilobytes per weight.