Web Font Performance

[00:00:00]
>> Jen Kramer: I will say that Google does not go down very often at all. And they are pretty good about having redundant systems. And so generally speaking, these web fonts aren't a problem. They're used all over all kinds of different websites with lots of traffic and generally this works just fine.

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Let me give you the one other caution here. The one other caution is this. Take a look up here in the upper right corner of this window here in Google fonts, see where it says load time is fast. Okay. Some of you are going to go bananas with these fonts, right?

[00:00:36]
We're gonna say, ooh, I want this one and I want this one and I want this one up here. First of all, graphic design speaking, it's kind of a fashion no. All right, not too many colors, not too many fonts, generally speaking. Generally speaking, two fonts are really,really good.

[00:00:56]
Three start to get a little busy. Four or five, it's kind of a disaster. For those of you who are old enough to remember when Microsoft Word came out and that we could use any font we wanted, and so we did. Yeah, it was kind of a disaster that way.

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So you can add all these fonts here, but notice what's gonna happen. The load time for your web page is gonna continue to go down. We're now down to quote, moderate, and this is measuring a load time just for our fonts. Okay? Remember also for your web page and how it loads, we have an HTML page, we have a CSS file, we have some number of images associated with that.

[00:01:36]
You'll eventually have some JavaScript. Now we have some fonts too. This is how web pages grow in file size, and they become, take a longer and longer time to download. I'm sure you've been on a website where you just sat there and waited, and waited, and waited for a great big huge webpage to download.

[00:01:55]
This is also how webpages eat data plans on your mobile devices. So be nice to your visitors. Don't go too bananas on the fonts.