Web Development Intermediate

What is Web Font Optimization?

Techniques for loading custom fonts efficiently to minimize their impact on page load performance and visual stability.

Web fonts significantly impact performance — a typical font file is 20-100KB, and pages often load multiple weights/styles. Optimization techniques include: subsetting fonts (removing unused characters), using modern formats (WOFF2 offers 30% better compression than WOFF), preloading critical fonts (link rel=preload), font-display: swap (showing fallback text immediately, swapping when font loads), self-hosting instead of Google Fonts (reducing DNS lookups and privacy concerns), limiting font variations (fewer weights/styles), and using system font stacks as fallbacks. Variable fonts can replace multiple static font files with a single file containing all weight/width variations.

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