Why Do Most Front-end Developers Love Google Fonts?

Google fonts is a collection of open source font families optimized for compatibility and owned by Google. Google fonts offer a wide selection of fonts that you can use within your website and you don’t need to host them locally. Most themes nowadays actually do have the fonts integrated into them. You can also use a plugin that integrates Google fonts, to add the fonts to your website. In these scenarios, your website will request the fonts from a Google server.

Why Should You Host Google Fonts Locally?

Since requests of Google fonts are made to the Google servers, if you are potentially using a number of these fonts within your website, this will lead to a number of requests to the servers. This in turn will result to your website being a bit more slower due to the number of HTTP requests.

In such cases, upon testing your site using tools such as GTMetrix, PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom, Google fonts are likely to be flagged, thereby reducing your scores and load time.

It is hence considerable that you host the fonts you need on your server to help in reducing the HTTP requests traffic, and help in increasing the overall site performance.

In addition, it is recommendable to use a CDN for your website if you wish to host your fonts locally. If you do not use a CDN, you could potentially cause negative speed impact to your website.

Hosting your fonts locally shouldn’t be a complicated task to implement within your WordPress site. Taking into consideration the optimization and page speed advantages that come along with having your Google fonts hosted locally, it is definitely something that needs to be taken into consideration.