Learn how to speed up your website by optimizing fonts. This guide covers smart font choices, reducing file size, using system fonts, and improving load times without sacrificing design quality.
Fonts are a core part of any website’s visual identity. They set the tone, shape the user experience, and help establish brand personality. With so many beautiful typefaces available online, it’s easy to get carried away choosing the perfect look. But while fonts are often picked for their aesthetics, they come with technical baggage that many people (especially non-developers) tend to overlook.
Lesser-known fact: fonts can take up a lot of space on your website. In fact, font usage is one of the most underrated culprits behind slow load times. Every custom font you add introduces extra HTTP requests, increases page weight, and delays how quickly your content appears.
Unlike images or videos, fonts often fly under the radar during performance audits, even though they quietly impact core metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Contentful Paint (FCP). Just take a look at this section from a Pingdom speed test I ran on a client’s site. Fonts alone were adding hundreds of kilobytes after a rebrand.
So can you do something about it? Absolutely. Read on to learn how to prevent fonts from slowing down your site without sacrificing style or readability.
The fonts you use on your website typically fall into two categories: "web-safe fonts" and "web fonts". Web-safe are built into most devices (e.g. Mac and Windows) by default, so a visitor’s browser doesn’t need to download anything extra to display your content. As a result, web-safe fonts load fast and efficiently. Some examples of web-safe fonts include Arial, Times New Roman, and Georgia.
The problem is, web-safe fonts are extremely limited in number. For this reason, most modern websites rely on "web fonts". These are fonts that aren’t pre-installed on a device and must be downloaded from the internet when someone visits your site. They’re popular because they offer more variety and can be tailored to match a brand’s unique vibe. Some of the most widely used web fonts these days include Inter, Poppins, Open Sans, Raleway, Futura, and Proxima Nova.
The downside of web fonts? Every time someone visits your site, their browser needs to fetch these fonts from an external source before the content can be fully rendered. That introduces delays and adds to your page size, especially if you’re using multiple font weights and styles (we’ll dive into this in more detail in a bit).
So here’s the tradeoff: If typography isn’t central to your brand identity, sticking with system fonts is a quick and easy way to improve performance. You’ll save on file size and boost load times with zero extra work. But if you do need the flexibility and aesthetic range that web fonts offer, don’t worry, there are still smart ways to optimize them. We’ll cover those next.
What’s the difference? Serif fonts have decorative strokes (or “tails”) at the ends of letters, while sans-serif fonts have clean, straight lines with no extra embellishments. See a side-by-side comparison below.
Fonts are essentially made up of glyphs (combinations of vector shapes) that represent letters or symbols. Serif fonts tend to have more glyphs compared to sans-serif fonts because they include those small decorative strokes on the letters, which are really just extra vector shapes. And these additional shapes increase the size of the font file.
When optimizing your website for speed, opting for sans-serif fonts over serif fonts can make a significant difference. Sans-serif fonts, such as Roboto, Lato, or Montserrat, have a clean and simple design, with no decorative strokes or serifs at the ends of the letters. This minimalist style makes them lighter in file size and faster to load. In contrast, serif fonts like Merriweather or Playfair Display contain additional decorative elements (the serifs), which require more vector shapes to render. These extra details can make serif fonts larger and slower to load.
What’s a font family? It's just a group of related font styles that share the same basic design but vary in weight, style, or width. For example, the Roboto font family includes styles like Roboto Regular, Roboto Bold, Roboto Italic, and Roboto Light.
It’s tempting to mix and match fonts. One for headings, another for body text, maybe even a third for accents….but using multiple font families can quickly bloat your site. Every new font you add means another font file for the visitor’s browser to load, which increases load time and affects performance. From a speed perspective, sticking to a single font family keeps things lightweight and efficient.
But there’s a design benefit too: using just one well-chosen font family helps maintain visual consistency across your site. This is especially helpful if you’re not a designer. Many modern font families come with a wide range of weights and styles, like regular, medium, semi-bold, and bold, which give you enough variety for hierarchy (like headings vs. body text) without needing to reach for a second or third font.
In short: one good font is often better than three average ones. You’ll keep your design clean and your load times short.
Sticking to one font family is a great start, but there’s one more thing that can quietly slow down your site: using too many font variants.
Variants refer to things like font weights (thin, regular, bold) and styles (italic, oblique). Each of these adds a separate font file, and the more variants you load, the heavier your site gets. Even if they’re all from the same font family, your browser still has to fetch each one. That adds up fast, especially on slower internet connections.
Here’s the good news: you usually only need regular, italic, and bold for most websites. That’s enough to createclear hierarchy between headings, paragraphs, and emphasized text. So if you’re using a font like Roboto (the one shown above), you don’t need to load every version from thin to black. You can just use the ones you’re actually using in your design.
Now, you might be wondering: “How do I even choose which font variants to load on my site?” Especially if you’re using tools like Webflow, WordPress, or Framer where it’s not always super obvious. Don’t worry, I’ve been there too. The next step is all about uploading your own font files, which gives you more control over exactly what gets loaded, and how fast. It’s easier than it sounds, and I’ll walk you through it.
Now that you know why loading only the necessary font variants matters, let’s walk through how easy it is to upload custom web font files to your website. I’ll be demonstrating how to do this using my favorite website builder, Webflow as the example here, but the general idea is similar for other platforms too. Let’s go with the popular Poppins font for this guide, but feel free to choose any font that fits your brand.
That’s it! Your custom font is now ready to use in your Webflow project. Because you only selected the necessary variants (instead of uploading all 18), your font won’t bloat your website unnecessarily, helping you keep things fast, lightweight, and optimized from the start.
Now that you’ve learned how to upload your own custom font files, there’s one more important step: setting proper font display settings. This controls how your text behaves while your web fonts are loading.
Ever seen this warning in a Google PageSpeed report? “Ensure that text remains visible during webfont load”.
This happens when a browser hides your text while waiting for the web font to load, something Google considers a poor user experience. On slower connections, it can leave users staring at a blank page, which isn’t great for engagement or SEO.
To avoid this, you’ll want to use the setting font-display: swap. What this does is tell the browser: “Hey, if the web font isn’t ready yet, show a fallback font for now—don’t leave the text blank.” Once your web font loads, it’ll automatically swap in.
If you’ve uploaded your custom fonts in Webflow, the display will be set to "swap" by default as you can see in the image above. However, always check to make sure it is configured this way. By doing so, you ensure your text is always visible, even during loading. This small step makes a big difference, especially for visitors on slower connections or mobile devices.
Wait, what? You can compress fonts?! We all know we should compress images before uploading them to a website (I cover that in this post if you’re curious) but fonts too? Yep. And it can make one hell of a difference!
Here’s the secret: font files (like those Poppins variants you downloaded earlier) come packed with a ton of extra stuff: special characters, symbols, and entire language sets you’ll probably never use on your site. By default, these files are bloated with glyphs you don’t need.
But you can fix that. By removing unused characters like Cyrillic, Vietnamese, or mathematical symbols, you can shrink your font file size dramatically without touching the characters your site actually uses. The result? Faster loading, smaller file sizes, and no loss in visual quality.
Note that you need to compress the font files before uploading them to Webflow. Also, if you would like to watch a video tutorial and follow along, here is a video I found helpful.
Take the four Poppins font variants that we downloaded as an example. Notice that, although we just selected four variants, the total size of the four variants is still 642 KB which may not seem that big but is enough to slow down your website! Remember, every kilobyte counts! If you are using a serif font or more variants of a font, the fonts will take up even more space.
After doing this, fonts should only be a very minimal size and not slow down your website at all!
font-display: swap – prevents text from being invisible while your web font loads.
