When you create a website, everything from the theme to the fonts of the website matters. You need to optimize every little aspect and perfect the many things to ensure that your website is user-friendly. This helps you increase conversion rates and boosts your revenues. You may be wondering how a simple font can affect your website performance. Different aspects including readability, appearance, loading time and preference of clients come into play. Clearly, optimizing your fonts is an essential step in your website development process. Here we describe ways to optimize web fonts which will help you instantly boost the appeal and performance of your WordPress site.

1. Use specialized services

There are a number of different services on the web that particularly deal with web font optimization. The matter is of critical importance which is why sites like Typekit and Google Fonts work tirelessly to cater to your needs. These are third-party fonts that help you to customize the fonts on your page thanks to its vast storage of most commonly accessed fonts. You can also use different font plugins which include:

• Use Any Font

If you don’t know much about CSS, this is the perfect plugin for you. You can use these fonts by opening the theme panel and using the variety of themes present. Each has its own custom fonts that help you chose the perfect font that you require. Plus, it works on different browsers, optimizing your experience.

• Easy Google Fonts

Which has an elaborate library of fonts for you to choose from. You can also make specialized custom designs and craft special art for your website. The font plugin gives you access to a live preview so that you can have a view of your actual site before everything is updated.

These fonts provide you with the ease of access to a number of fonts. You can easily style le your custom fonts and modify the file according to your preference. They also help to incorporate the fonts into the website, boosting the entire process.

 2. Asynchronous loading of web fonts

You can get a blocking request when you are requesting fonts through font-face. To avoid this issue you need to employ different java scripts and call your fonts through them. There will be millions of different styles to choose from however, you need to act wisely. Being a blogger, you tend to find the best ways to craft a user-friendly and efficient website. Here is what you should do in order to optimize the speed of your website:

• Use a variety of java scripts to call the different fonts via font-face
• Use different fonts so that the website can run them simultaneously
• Employ different typefaces to create a user-oriented design that will boost your website performance.

Web fonts create a key role in improving the UX as well as conversion rate of a website. Considering these two factors, even the best online business ideas may suffer from low traffic, high spam score, and high bounce rate due to bad UX and web font loading time.

3. Don’t go overboard with typefaces

Where employing a limited number of typefaces is good for your website, choosing too many is hazardous. It can:

• Delay the loading of your website due to the different number of sets of fonts that the website will need to load every time it accessed the page.
• Decrease the performance of your website because of the burden on the browser.
• Reduce conversion rates due to excessive loading time and poor user interface.

In order to improve the website performance, you need to choose a moderate number of typefaces and pair them together in order to boost your website efficiency. Don’t be smitten by the millions of different styles. Burdening the host with them will result in unnecessary load on your website, considerably decreasing its performance.

4. Use a preload header

You need to be choosy when using this feature because if you add the different resources, the browser picks them all at once which makes the whole thing pointless. On the other hand, if you are selective and choose the selective fonts precisely, a preload header can be very advantageous.

• It helps the browser to load all the fonts excessively fast
• It also helps you easily incorporate the fonts into the site
• Aids the website to load the required fonts optimizing the website performance.

5. Mach your fonts with the browser

Different browsers have different font compatibility, a wise decision is to do your research and chose fonts according to good review. Website builders incorporate a variety of font formats depending on the popularity of the browser. In short, there are 4 types of fonts. They include:

1. WOFF, this is the Web Open Font Format, devolved in 2009, it is a true type of font. Developers use it with Metadata and for compression.
2. TTF, also known as the True Type Font which has been around since as early as the 80s
3. WOFF2, the Web Open Font Format 2 improves on the preexisting fonts and is an improved version of the font.
4. Embedded Open Type, often used for the embedded codes in the website. Originally made by Microsoft, it has a major appeal for users.

If you use Google Fonts, a major part of choosing and optimization is done for you. This is because:

• Google has compressed all of its fonts for ease of access
• Google provides the fonts via Google’s CDN improving the speed of delivery
• Is already optimized, but still allows you to make the preferred changes.

6. Cookies are good

You can use cookies to store the fonts of a website so that the browser doesn’t have to download them over and over again. This improves loading speed as the fonts are present in the browser cache memory already. You can also use the local storage. It is slower than cookies but it does provide a longer storage of fonts. Enabling the cookies will

• Provide a temporary storage of the loaded character s of the fonts, serving as a temporary memory.
• Improve website loading speeds as part of the fonts were already stored as cookies when you first accessed the page
• Boost website performance and conversion rates thanks to better loading speeds.

7. Limit the characters

There are a ton of characters present in every font you choose for your website. So considering you used 4 fonts, this would mean that the rower will need to load 4 different sets of character. This can lead to:

• Excessive burden on the browser
• Excessive delays due to massive downloading every time a browser accesses the website
• Slower loading time due to the large load

However, if you set the browser to load only the specific character found on the page, the website will load much quicker. Of course, you won’t use the entire set of characters from every font, hence, if you chose a specific font, only the characters showing on the page will load which will decrease the ultimate load on the browser. As a result, your website performance will improve considerably.

Endnote

You need to consider the many ways you can use to optimize the website fonts. Doing so will help to boost the website performance and will optimize user experience. This will translate into higher conversion rates and increased revenues, benefiting your business. Follow the steps above in order to optimize your WordPress site fonts for better performance.