This article explains the impact of fonts on your website’s speed. It also shows the importance of optimizing your web fonts for a seamless user experience. It offers you the best practices, guidelines, and tips to use Monotype Fonts ’web projects and digital ads effectively.
Note: Know more about our web projects and digital ads.
Your website or digital ad should be a balance of aesthetics, performance, and user experience. Apart from being visually appealing, your website should perform well and provide a seamless user experience on all platforms and devices.
Impact of fonts on your website's performance
Font selection (such as number of fonts and size of font file) can influence your website’s speed. When you open any web page, your browser downloads all the resources (such as images, videos, and fonts) necessary to display the page correctly. The browser takes more time to download large font files.
This results in undesirable user experience. Less loading time also leads to better SEO rankings, making your website more visible.
You can organize and optimize your web fonts with Web Project and Digital Ads available in the My Library section of Monotype Fonts.
Follow the below standard guidelines to organize and optimize the fonts used in your project and create a more efficient and user-friendly experience for your users:
Set a font budget for your project: Define a budget for font resources (such as number of fonts, font variants, and character sets) for your project to keep performance of the project in check. You can add/remove fonts in the web projects and digital ads based on your requirement.
Use optimized font formats: It’s beneficial to use optimized font formats, such as Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and Web Open Font Format 2.0 (WOFF2) on the web for better compression and performance. It mitigates load time issues by reducing the font file size and enhancing the loading speed. All web fonts in Monotype Fonts are created using WOFF and WOFF2 formats.
Subset fonts to reduce file size: Subsetting a font means that you should only include the characters and glyphs that you need in your project and remove the rest. This reduces the size of font files and improves the performance of web fonts. With Monotype Fonts it is easy to subset your web fonts efficiently for optimal performance. Refer to the article for subsetting web fonts.
Minimize the number of font files: You can decrease the amount of data a browser needs to download by reducing the number of font files used on your website, improving the speed of your website. You should use as few font families, weights, and styles as necessary to improve your website’s performance. You can also consider using variable fonts to have multiple styles in one file.
Note: Based on this guideline, we ensure that the performance of your project doesn’t get hampered and allow adding up to four (4) font styles of a font family at a time in any web project or digital ad. However, if you want to add more than four styles then you can add fonts in the same web project or digital ad again.
Check font usage: Regularly check the fonts that you are using to identify which fonts are being loaded and how they affect the performance of your website. You can then remove the fonts that are adding unnecessary load on your project from your web project and digital ads folder.
Place font requests early: Order font resources in a way that fonts are loaded as early as possible without blocking critical assets. Use the add to and favorite options to add the required fonts to your web project and digital ads folder.
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