Tag Archives: webfonts

No Google fonts with NoScript

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I’m not only into optimizing the speed of sites with for the benefit of their visitors, but also into speeding up all sites in my browser, to satisfy my own impatience. I already blocked Facebook, Twitter and Google+ widgets using NoScript’s ABE and now added this little snippet in ABE’s user ruleset to stop Google Fonts from being loaded;

# no google fonts
Sites fonts.googleapis.com
Deny INCLUSION(CSS,SCRIPT)

Result: less requests, less to download and faster rendering without that ugly FOUT. Because let’s face it, your fancy fonts slow down the web and they are of no interest to me.

Website performance: impact of web fonts

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Although it was possible to embed fonts in web pages even during the dark ages of the internet, 2010 was the year when the pieces of the web typography puzzle really fell into place, Designers, Marketeers and especially “brand identity guards” are ecstatic about this evolution.

But there’s little to be found on the performance impact of web fonts. Because you’re downloading extra files, so there must be some impact, no? I created 4 identical pages; one without non-browser-native fonts, one with Cufon (which I already knew I wasn’t fond of), one with the hosted Google Font solution and one with local fonts (from fontsquirrel.com). Those 4 pages were analyzed by webpagetest.org (3 runs on IE8 from the Amsterdam node). These are the results:

doc complete (s) # requests download size (Kb) diff with basic (s) full testresult url
basic 1.507 21 135 – http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110106_1Y_7S9K/3/details/
cufon 2.452 26 176 0.95 http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110106_F8_7S9P/1/details/
webfont (local) 1.807 23 189 0.30 http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110106_V3_7SBD/1/details/
webfont (google) 1.771 23 162 0.26 http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110106_S4_7SM2/3/details/

As was to be expected and confirmed in the Google Webfonts FAQ, even the fastest method (hosted Google Fonts) is 0,26s slower then the version without web fonts. Locally hosted fonts are marginally slower, but that’s because (for reasons I don’t fully understand) 2 font-files were loaded instead of only 1 in the Google Fonts-powered page. Cufon isn’t really worth mentioning here, it’s dead-slow and has become rather irrelevant I guess. I did not test a version with images instead of web fonts, but that would probably yield approximately the same result (5 image files, each somewhere between 4 and 8Kb?) and is sub-optimal form a SEO and accessibility point of view.

So 0,3 seconds, that’s not too bad, no? Or is it? If you’re creating an online shop, Amazon’s experience might be of particular interest here; every 100ms delay costs them 1% in sales. So are you willing to lose 3% revenue just to have those nice fonts, which your visitors probably couldn’t care about less?

My advice; don’t use web fonts if you value performance. And you should consider performance a top priority, not just for sales’ sake, but because raw website performance also impacts usability and search engine ranking.

If your brand identity manager insists on using the right fonts, performance be damned, then try to at least follow these basic best practices:

  • have the CSS that defines your fonts (with font-face) as early in your HTML as possible and  certainly before any script is loaded
  • use Google’s hosted font-solution if possible; it’s fast, the CSS is optimized for the browser that requests it and there’s a lot of free fonts at your disposal
  • if you have to host the fonts yourself, make sure to serve the WOFF format (the new standard) and SVG (for iPhone/iPad) next to the more traditional TTF (the “old” standard) and EOT (for MSIE)
  • if you’re hosting your own fonts, configure your webserver to on-the-fly compress ttf, svg & eot-files (woff-files are already compressed) and set expire-headers for all fonts in the far future to allow optimal caching (example for Apache):

AddType font/ttf .ttf
AddType font/x-woff .woff
AddType image/svg+xml .svg
AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject .eot
ExpiresByType font/ttf “access plus 30 days”
ExpiresByType font/x-woff “access plus 30 days”
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml “access plus 30 days”
ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject “access plus 30 days”
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf application/vnd.ms-fontobject image/svg+xml