Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

For the most part, web fonts nowadays are faster than ever. With more standardised FOUT/FOIT behaviour from browser vendors, to the newer font-display specification, performance—and therefore the user—seems to have been finally been put front-and-centre.

It’s widely accepted that self-hosted fonts are the fastest option: same origin means reduced network negotiation, predictable URLs mean we can preload, self-hosted means we can set our own cache-control directives, and full ownership mitigates the risks that come with leaving static assets on third-party origins.

That said, the convenience of a service like Google Fonts cannot be overstated. Their ability to serve the tiniest possible font files tailored to specific user agents and platforms is amazing, and with such a huge, freely-available library served from Google-grade CDNs… I definitely see why people continue to turn to it.

On this site, in which performance is the only name of the game, I forgo web fonts entirely, opting instead to make use of the visitor’s system font. This is fast, incredibly well suited to the device in question, and has almost zero engineering overhead. But, on harry.is, I really wanted to throw caution to the wind. To hell with it! Let’s have a web font!

However, I still needed it to be fast.

While prototyping, I turned to Google Fonts, and with their recent ability to support font-display via a URL parameter (&display=swap), I knew that things would stay pretty speedy. Then I had an idea.

It started with a tweet:

TIP: If you’re going to use font-display for your Google Fonts then it makes sense to asynchronously load the whole request chain.
— @csswizardry

While font-display: swap; is a huge win, there are still a lot of things leaving me feeling uneasy. What else could I do to make Google Fonts fast?

Suffice to say, I ended up going down a little rabbit hole…

Testing

I ran the same suite of tests against the harry.is and csswizardry.com homepages. I started out with harry.is because that’s where I was using Google Fonts, but I felt it was a page too simple to be realistic. So, I cloned the CSS Wizardry homepage a bunch of times and implemented the various different methods there. For each section of this post, I will list the results for both sites. My variants are:

• Legacy: Google Fonts with no font-display.
• font-display: swap;: Using Google Fonts’ new default.
• Async CSS: Loading the Google Fonts File asynchronously.
• preload: preloading the CSS file to increase its priority.
• preconnect: Warming up the fonts.gstatic.com origin myself.

Further, each variant is additive—it includes the previous variant as well as its own additions. I didn’t try just preload or just async, because it would be pointless—we know that a combination will fare better than any on their own.

For each test, I captured the following metrics:

• First Paint (FP): To what extent is the critical path affected?
• First Contentful Paint (FCP): How soon can we actually read something, whether it’s a web font or not?
• First Web Font (FWF): At what point has the first web font loaded?
• Visually Complete (VC): When has everything settled down (a proxy, but not equivalent to, Last Web Font)?
• Lighthouse Score: Does it even count if it wasn’t on Lighthouse?

N.B. All tests were conducted using a private WebPageTest instance (WebPageTest is down right now so I was unable to use the public instance, which means I can’t share any URLs—apologies). The specific profile was a Samsung Galaxy S4 over 3G.

To make the snippets easier to read, I’m going to replace all instances of https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400;1,700 with $CSS.

Default/Legacy

Google Fonts played a really great move in the last year or so. By default, any newly created Google Font snippet comes with the &display=swap parameter that injects font-display: swap; into all of the @font-face at-rules. The value of the parameter can be any of swap, optional, fallback, or block. You can read more on MDN.

For my baseline, however, I was going to trim the font-display back off. This is the legacy format that a lot of sites will likely still use, and it makes for a more suitable baseline to compare against.

Snippet:

<link rel="stylesheet"
      href="$CSS" />

There are two key issues here:

1. A synchronous, ergo render-blocking, CSS file on a third-party origin.
2. A file containing @font-face at-rules with no font-display descriptors.

It’s synchronous on top of synchronous—not good.

Results (s) – harry.is:

Results (s) – CSS Wizardry:

Alright. Here’s our baseline. The Google Fonts file is the only render-blocking external resource either of the two tests has, and we can see they both have the exact same first paint. One thing I was happily surprised by during these experiments was the consistency of Google Fonts.

At this point, Lighthouse is giving one error and one warning:

• (Error) Ensure text remains visible during webfont load
• (Warning) Eliminate render-blocking resources

The first is a result of not having a web font loading solution (e.g. font-display); the second is a result of the synchronous Google Fonts CSS file.

Now, let’s start adding some progressive changes and, hopefully, improvements.

font-display: swap;

For this test, I added the &display=swap back in. In effect, this makes the font files themselves asynchronous—the browser immediately displays our fallback text before swapping to the web font whenever it arrives. This means we’re not going to leave users looking at any invisible text (FOIT), which makes for both a faster and more pleasant experience.

N.B. It’s only more pleasant if you make the effort to define a suitable fallback to display in the interim—flashing a page full of Times New Roman before settling on Open Sans would likely be a net worse experience. Thankfully, Monica has made this process not only easy, but surprisingly fun. I wouldn’t be able to do this bit without her Font Style Matcher.

Snippet:

<link rel="stylesheet"
      href="$CSS&display=swap" />

Results – harry.is:

Results – CSS Wizardry:

We haven’t removed any render-blocking resources from the critical path, so I wasn’t expecting to see any improvements in first paint. In fact, while harry.is remained identical, CSS Wizardry got 200ms slower. What we do see, however, is a dramatic improvement in first contentful paint—over a second on harry.is! First web font improved on harry.is, but not on csswizardry.com. Visually complete was 200ms slower.

I’m happy to say, for the metrics that matter the most, we are 700–1,200ms faster.

While this does massively improve the time it takes the web font to render, it’s still defined inside a synchronous CSS file—we can only expect so much improvement from this move.

Predictably, Lighthouse now only gives one warning:

• (Warning) Eliminate render-blocking resources

Therefore, the next step is to solve the synchronous CSS file.

To quote, err, myself: If you’re going to use font-display for your Google Fonts then it makes sense to asynchronously load the whole request chain. It was this initial thought that led to my tweet in the first place—if I’ve effectively made the contents of the CSS file asynchronous, then it kinda sucks to leave the CSS file itself fully synchronous.

font-display: swap; is a good idea.

Async CSS

Making your CSS asynchronous is one of the key techniques involved in employing Critical CSS. While there are a number of ways to achieve this, I’d dare say the simplest and most ubiquitous is Filament Group’s print media type trick.

This will implicitly tell the browser to load the CSS file in a non-blocking fashion, applying the styles only to the print context. However, the moment the file arrives, we tell the browser to apply it to all contexts, thus styling the rest of the page.

Snippet:

<link rel="stylesheet"
      href="$CSS&display=swap"
      media="print" >"this.media='all'" />

While the trick is devilishly simple—which is what makes it so cool—I’ve long had my reservations. Y’see, a regular, synchronous stylesheet blocks rendering, so a browser will assign it Highest priority. A print stylesheet (or any stylesheet that doesn’t match the current context) is assigned the priority at the complete opposite end of the spectrum: Idle.

This means that as browsers begin making requests, the asynchronous CSS file often gets grossly under-prioritised (or rather, it’s prioritised correctly, but probably way less than you expect). Take for example Vitamix, a client for whom I implemented asynchronous CSS for their own font provider(s):

The browser is doing exactly what we told it: request these CSS files with a print-stylesheet’s worth of priority. Thus, on a 3G connection, it takes over nine seconds to download each file. The browser puts almost everything else, including in-body resources, ahead of our print stylesheets. This means that the page in question didn’t render its custom font until an eyewatering 12.8s on 3G.

Thankfully, while dealing with web fonts, this isn’t the end of the world:

• they should always be considered an enhancement anyway, so we need to be able to cope without them;
• we can and should design decent fallbacks for use during their absence, and;
• if we expect delays of such severity, we should use font-display: optional;.

For below the fold CSS, however, delays of almost 10 seconds are unacceptable—it’s almost 100% certain that a user will have scrolled within that timeframe.

Still! What happens to Google Fonts if we load it asynchronously?

Results – harry.is:

Results – CSS Wizardry:

These results are tremendous.

I’m really happy with these outcomes. First paint was a staggering 1.6–1.7s improvement on our baseline, and up to a 1.9s improvement on the previous variant in the case of CSS Wizardry. First contentful paint was improved as much as 2.8s against our baseline, and Lighthouse scores hit 100 for the first time.

As far as the critical path is concerned, this was a huge win.

However—and this is a big however—as a result of lowering the priority of the CSS file, our first web font is up to 500ms slower in the case of CSS Wizardry against our baseline. This is the danger of the print media hack.

Asynchronously loading Google Fonts is a net good idea, but reducing the priority of the CSS file has actually slowed down the rendering of our custom font.

I’m going to say that asynchronous CSS is an overall good idea but I need to somehow mitigate the priority issue.

preload

Okay, so if print CSS is too low priority, what we need is a high priority asynchronous fetch. Enter preload.

Complementing our media-trick stylesheet with a preload ensures we get the best of all worlds:

1. an asynchronous high priority fetch that will work in almost all modern browsers, and;
2. a very widely supported method for reapplying CSS that we loaded asynchronously.

N.B. We can’t go full preload as it isn’t widely enough supported. In fact, at the time of writing, about 20% of this site’s visitors would be unable to make use of it. Consider the print stylesheet a fallback.

Snippet:

<link rel="preload"
      as="style"
      href="$CSS&display=swap" />

<link rel="stylesheet"
      href="$CSS&display=swap"
      media="print" >"this.media='all'" />

N.B. In future, we should be able to use Priority Hints to solve this issue.

Results – harry.is:

Results – CSS Wizardry:

While first paint either remained the same or got slower, first contentful paint either remained the same or got faster, and in the case of CSS Wizardry, first web font was a staggering 600ms faster than the previous iteration.

In the case of harry.is, almost nothing changed since our previous variant. Visually complete was 200ms faster, but any first- metrics were untouched. It was seeing these results that actually spurred me to also test against CSS Wizardry. Because harry.is is such a small and simple page, there wasn’t much network contention for a print stylesheet to yield to—changing its priority didn’t really help it out much at all.

In the case of CSS Wizardry, we see first paint 300ms slower, which is unexpected but unrelated (there is no render blocking CSS, so changing the priority of an asynchronous CSS file can have no bearing here—I’m going to chalk it up to an anomaly in testing). Happily, first contentful paint improved by 200ms, first web font was 600ms faster, and visually complete was 700ms faster.

preloading Google Fonts is a good idea.

preconnect

The last piece of the puzzle I wanted to solve the trip to yet-another origin. While we link out to fonts.googleapis.com for our CSS, the font files themselves are hosted on fonts.gstatic.com. On a high-latency connection, this spells bad news.

Google Fonts are good to us—they preconnect the fonts.gstatic.com origin preemptively via an HTTP header attached to the fonts.googleapis.com response:

However, the execution of this header is bound by the response’s TTFB, which on high-latency networks can be very, very high. The median TTFB (including request queueing, DNS, TCP, TLS, and server time) for the Google Fonts CSS file across all tests was 1406ms. Conversely, the median download time for the CSS file was just 9.5ms—it took 148× longer to get to the headers of the file than it did to download the file itself.

Put another way: even though Google are preconnecting the fonts.gstatic.com origin for us, they’re only gaining about a 10ms head-start. Put another-other way, this file is latency-bound, not bandwidth-bound.

If we implement a first-party preconnect, we should stand to make some pretty huge gains. Let’s see what happens.

Snippet:

<link rel="preconnect"
      href="https://fonts.gstatic.com"
      crossorigin />

<link rel="preload"
      as="style"
      href="$CSS&display=swap" />

<link rel="stylesheet"
      href="$CSS&display=swap"
      media="print" >"this.media='all'" />

We can visualise the benefits well in WebPageTest:

Results – harry.is:

Results – CSS Wizardry:

Here we go! First (contentful) paint is realistically untouched. Any changes here are unrelated to our preconnect as the preconnect only impacts resources after the critical path. Our focus is on first web font and visually complete, both of which show tremendous improvement. 700–1,200ms improvement on first web font and 700–900ms improvement on visually complete against our previous variant, and 600–900ms and 600–800ms respective improvements against our baseline. Lighthouse scores are sitting pretty at 100 and 99.

preconnecting fonts.gstatic.com is a good idea.

Bonus: font-display: optional;

Using asynchronous CSS and font-display leaves us susceptible to FOUT (or, hopefully, FOFT if we’ve designed our Fallbacks properly). To try and mitigate this, I decided to run a test using font-display: optional;.

This variation tells the browser that web fonts are considered optional, and if we can’t get hold of the font files during our extremely small block period then we offer no swap period. The practical upshot of which is that in the event that the web fonts takes too long to load, that pageview won’t utilise it at all. This helps to prevent the FOUT which will in turn lead to a more stable experience for your user—they won’t see text restyle part-way through their pageview—and a better Cumulative Layout Shift score.

However, this proved consistently troublesome when using asynchronous CSS. When the print stylesheet gets turned into an all stylesheet, the browser updates the CSSOM then applies it against the DOM. In this moment, the page is told it needs some web fonts, and the extremely small block period kicks in, showing a FOIT midway through the page load lifecycle. To make things worse, the browser will replace the FOIT with the same fallback it started with, so the user doesn’t even get the benefit of a new font. It basically looks like a bug.

It’s much easier to visualise it than it is to explain, so here’s a screenshot of the filmstrip:

And a video showing the issue in DevTools:

I would not recommend using font-disply: optional; alongside asynchronous CSS; I would recommend using asynchronous CSS. Ergo, I would not recommend font-display: optional;. It’s better overall to have non-blocking CSS with a FOUT than it is to have the needless FOIT.

Comparisons and Visualisations

In these slow-motion videos, you can see the differences quite clearly.

harry.is

• Async, preload, and preconnect all start rendering at 1.8s.
  • This also represents their first contentful paints—useful information in the first render.
• Legacy and swap both start rendering at 3.4s.
  • Though legacy is missing any text—FOIT.
• preconnect loads its web font at 3.8s.
  • It’s deemed visually complete at 4.4s.
• Legacy makes its first contentful and first web font paint at 4.5s.
  • They’re one and the same as everything is synchronous.
• Legacy’s visually complete is at 5s.
• Async’s visually complete comes in at 5.1s.
• swap is deemed complete at 5.2s.
• preload is deemed visually complete at 5.3s.

CSS Wizardry

• Async starts rendering at 1.7s.
• preconnect starts rendering at 1.9s.
  • Its first contentful paint is also 1.9s—useful information in the first render.
• preload starts rendering at 2s.
  • Its first contentful paint is also at 2s.
• Async renders content at 2.2s.
• Legacy starts rendering at 3.4s.
• swap makes it first- and first contentful paint at 3.6s.
• preconnect is deemed visually complete at 3.6s.
• Legacy makes its first contentful paint at 4.3s.
• preload is visually complete at 4.3s.
• Legacy is considered visually complete at 4.4s.
• swap completes at 4.6s.
• Async comes in last at 5s.

preconnect is fastest across all metrics

Findings

While self-hosting your web fonts is likely to be the overall best solution to performance and availability problems, we’re able to design some fairly resilient measures to help mitigate a lot of these issues when using Google Fonts.

A combination of asynchronously loading CSS, asynchronously loading font files, opting into FOFT, fast-fetching asynchronous CSS files, and warming up external domains makes for an experience several seconds faster than the baseline.

This is something that I strongly recommend adopting if you are a Google Fonts user.

If Google Fonts isn’t your only render-blocking resource, and if you’re violating any of the other principles for fast CSS (e.g. if you’re @importing your Google Fonts CSS file), then your mileage will vary. These optimisations are most beneficial on project where Google Fonts is posing one of your biggest performance bottlenecks.

Google Fonts Async Snippet

There a lot of techniques combined here, but the resulting code is still slim and maintainable enough that it should’t pose a problem. The snippet doesn’t need breaking apart and can all be kept together in the <head> of your document.

Here is the optimum snippet to use for fast Google Fonts:

<!--
  - 1. Preemptively warm up the fonts’ origin.
  -
  - 2. Initiate a high-priority, asynchronous fetch for the CSS file. Works in
  -    most modern browsers.
  -
  - 3. Initiate a low-priority, asynchronous fetch that gets applied to the page
  -    only after it’s arrived. Works in all browsers with JavaScript enabled.
  -
  - 4. In the unlikely event that a visitor has intentionally disabled
  -    JavaScript, fall back to the original method. The good news is that,
  -    although this is a render-blocking request, it can still make use of the
  -    preconnect which makes it marginally faster than the default.
  -->

<!-- [1] -->
<link rel="preconnect"
      href="https://fonts.gstatic.com"
      crossorigin />

<!-- [2] -->
<link rel="preload"
      as="style"
      href="$CSS&display=swap" />

<!-- [3] -->
<link rel="stylesheet"
      href="$CSS&display=swap"
      media="print" >"this.media='all'" />

<!-- [4] -->
<noscript>
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        href="$CSS&display=swap" />
</noscript>

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

By Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.