Free font Optimizing Web Fonts for Performance and User Experience

With the constant increase in demand for search optimization changes and the continuous changes with search engines, many businesses overlook many other vital factors in building a website that enhances user experiences. One of those factors is web fonts.

Believe it or not, web fonts can have a huge impact on both the performance of a website, but also the user’s experience of it. This is why optimizing web fonts is a vital process of site-building.

To help anyone looking to find the best practices for optimizing web fonts with performance and user experience in mind, we have crafted this article.

Let’s check out what needs to be done!

The Importance of Web Font Optimization

Before we delve into the best practices for web font optimization, let’s first have a look at its importance and whether it is worth doing so for your web design.

Here is a list of some of the benefits you can see from this process:

- Faster loading times – sites with optimized fonts will have much faster loading times, smoother animations and transitions, and overall better performance. This is a huge factor when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Better SEO – web font optimization is also part of the best practices for search engine optimization, so that’s another huge plus that can bring in more customers to your business.

Improved user experience – with smoother animations and faster page speed/loading times, your users will have a much easier time navigating your website. So, optimized web fonts will definitely boost user experience and improve customer retention as well.

With that in mind, let’s have a look at how to pick the right web font and optimize it as well.

Finding the Right Web Font

While font optimization is crucial for website performance, the aesthetic aspect of a font is just as important. So, first things first, you need to choose a font that best fits the design of your website, as well as one that fits your content and your brand voice.

Here are some other things to consider when choosing a font:

Readability

The primary goal of a font is for it to be readable. Unfortunately, that is not the case with every font out there, so make sure to pick one so that users can read your text well. As unlikely as it may seem, customers will be discouraged from reading your content or navigating your website which ultimately increases your bounce rate.

No More Than Three Fonts

When choosing a family of fonts, the best practice is to keep the number of typefaces down to two or three, anything above that will make your website look inconsistent and unprofessional.

So, pick a primary font that will be used for headlines, tabs, categories, and other larger font-size wording. Then, choose a secondary font, preferably from the same font family, which will be used for most of your content like blog posts, product descriptions, FAQs, etc.

Finally, you can also add accent fonts which can add importance to certain content like ad anchors, CTAs, etc.

Web Font Format

While choosing the design, it’s essential to choose which format you are going to use for your website.

Usually, most brands pick from these three formats:

TrueType Fonts (TTF)

OpenType Fonts (OTF)

Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and WOFF2

But, nowadays, most people go for WOFF2 since it supports almost every browser out there, it is most optimized for web use, and has much better compression which means faster font downloads for users which ultimately leads to faster page speeds. Although it is possible to include TTF as well in the rare cases a user is coming from a less-known browser. Better safe than sorry!

Setting Up Your Font for Optimization

With the right font in mind, let’s take a look at the optimization process:

Choosing the Right Web Font Format

As we previously mentioned, WOFF2 covers most browsers and offers the best compressions, so it’s the most logical choice for businesses, although going with other formats won’t affect performance too much either.

Subset Your Fonts

Every font comes with a set number of glyphs which represents the characters. These glyphs are used as an ID for every character and every single glyph takes up space in the font’s database.

So, by creating a subset of a font, we can remove any unnecessary characters that most likely won’t be used on the website, creating a “lightweight” font effectively reducing loading times. The simplest way to do this is by using online tools that can quickly subset fonts.

Serve Fonts through CDN

To ensure that your fonts have the fastest loading times for all regions, choose a reliable hosting provider with CDN integration. CDN reduces the latency and overall bandwidth between the server and the client, which leads to better site performance.

Limit the Font Variants

Most fonts come with a number of variants and styles and applying them to the website can increase the font download/loading time, and affect the overall performance of the website. So, if you are not planning to use the different font styles, consider sticking to just one.

With CSS, you can use “font-weight” and “font-style” to pick one style and stick with it.

Browser Caching Is a Must

Browser caching is one of those must-dos when focusing on site performance. Browser caching also helps with fonts, so any returning customers will have an even smoother user experience.

Font Display Property

The “font-display” property in CSS is another “hack” that can help with font loading times. There are several options for font-display and it’s usually on “auto” by default. However, usually the better option is the “swap” or “fallback” option.

The swap value tells the browser to use its fallback font until it loads the site’s custom font. This doesn’t necessarily improve performance, but it prevents FOIT (flash of invisible text).

The fallback value is similar to the swap value, but the difference is that the browser will hide the text and add a bit of delay to wait for the custom font to download. If it doesn’t load in the specified waiting time, it will go back to the fallback font and load the custom font a few seconds later.

Conclusion

Optimizing web fonts is essential for a modern website, but it is just as important to balance the visual aspect with performance as well. By following these strategies, you can ensure your website loads quickly, provides a seamless user experience, and maintains an attractive design. Prioritize WOFF2, subset your fonts, and leverage modern CSS properties and web technologies to achieve the best results.