Optimizing Web Fonts for Performance on WordPress

Last updated on September 15th, 2023 at 01:08 pm

Your website is your comfort zone as well as a comfort zone for your targeted audience. WordPress has always given the best web design with the best options. The greatest asset used to make a great website great is utilizing exceptional web fonts. But in most cases, these web fonts, when poorly used, end up bogging down the website. Apart from other important considerations like pictures, blogs, posts, etc., web fonts need to be given high priority for optimization. Web fonts are becoming commonly used in web design by a massive number of WordPress websites. According to Safari SEO in Sydney, webmasters must choose their fonts carefully. As Google looks to rollout page performance as a key ranking metric in 2021, your font selection can play a critical role in the way that your site loads and, ultimately, performs in the organic search results.

Optimization checklist

Many people believe that all web fonts delay page rendering or affect the performance of the website negatively. This is not the case though, because better font optimization can have the exact opposite results. It can give your visitors a much better user experience, upgraded readability, and searching capacity. It can offer all these at the same time delivering a multi-resolution result that works well in different screen formats with different resolutions.

You should also optimize font assets to avoid unnecessary delays. Even as you take care of font assets, you should also optimize how these fonts are fetched and utilized on different pages of your website.

• You should avoid using too many fonts on your web pages.
• Utilize the ability of fonts to be a subset to deliver the glyphs.
• This splitting or subset reduces the file size and improves the download speed of the resource.
• You should be careful though when you are defining subsets. Make sure you define them for re-use.
• Ensure that you reduce the number of variants used for every font.
• This will give you an excellent user experience in terms of consistency and web speed.
• Ensure that you deliver each font in WOFF2, WOFF, EOT, and TTF formats.

Optimize Google Fonts

One of the reasons you should consider optimizing your fonts using Google fonts is that they are compressed and provided over Google’s CDN.

• Its built-in optimization feature makes its delivery one of the fastest.
• This built-in optimization will happen automatically.
• You must ensure that you do selective optimization as it will further speed up the delivery of fonts.
• It is recommended that you should be selective when choosing Google fonts.
• For optimal results, avoid selecting all the tons of styles and character sets available. Just stick to the character sets and styles while coming to meet your unique needs in the best possible way.
• You should also avoid selecting every option of italic and bold fonts.
• This is because browsers always assign some styles from the available ones only. So, the unavailability of your selected font can create confusion.

Minimize the number of typefaces in your project

There are many beautiful typefaces available that you can choose from. This variety of choice should not let you choose all the typefaces available just to make your website attractive. Just choose a few typefaces that you need, because choosing too many will only weigh down your website. In most cases, paired typefaces will work well for your design and will not affect the performance of your website negatively.

Asynchronous Loading

Asynchronous loading works wonders because it utilizes a Web Font Loader. Web Font Loader is a tool developed by Adobe and other font providers. This tool has been developed using JavaScript it has a lot of font optimization options. You can take advantage of this tool in optimizing your fonts.

During the process of web fonts loading, the rest of the web page cannot be viewed. It can be called blocking of the page and it affects the user experience adversely.

• If loading takes a long time, the users will not be able to view the desired content on the web pages.
• To eradicate this blocking behavior, you can utilize asynchronous loading. During this loading, a file can be viewed as the browser loads web fonts.

Optimizing websites using web fonts

First of all, you have to ensure that your website is hosted by a trusted hosting services company. To do this, you must research to confirm some things like;

• How many visitors per month seek their services?
• Up-time
• Flexibility
• Customer services. Find out how they treat their customers.
• Backup Solutions

Theme Optimization

The theme that you choose will play an important role in the speed of your website.

• It is pertinent to select a that theme supports mobile usage and a great SEO.
• While using a customized theme, prefer to use an effective semantic code and avoid missing files.
• It is advisable to use CSS to replace image files and keep them lean to the maximum extent.
• Don’t forget to reduce the number of classes that are present in your code.

You have an option to minify the CSS and JS after the use of the Minify plugin.

Loading Google Fonts Using JavaScript

You should use this method by following a simple way. Just copy the code given in the JavaScript tab in Google Fonts which can be found in the usage instructions section. Then paste it in your theme header.php file just after <head> tag.

The last tip is to optimize fonts using google web fonts to avoid loading unnecessary fonts. Don’t make an unnecessary addition to all the available styles.

Conclusion

Optimizing web fonts for performance in WordPress sites needs a deeper understanding of how you can add web fonts to your site and the best strategy to adopt when optimizing. For instance, using cookies can be more efficient than using local storage. After following the above instructions, you will get a positive boost in the performance of your WordPress site.