In this article we will show you in a few, easy to follow, steps how to self-host Google fonts. Preloading wil be unreliable when using Google fonts since the font url may change from day to day. Preloading indicates to a browser that a resource, in this case a font file, should be fetched as soon as possible with high priority. With self hosted fonts you have full control over the cache time. Every half hour, an extra connection has to be set up again. Unfortunately even the Google servers are never as fast as reusing the existing connection to your server that has already been established anyway.īecause Google hosted fonts can change regularly, Google sets the cache time (the time that your browser can locally store the font and the CSS) to only half an hour. Google's super fast edge servers can deliver a web font font to you at lightning speed. To prevent this, you should download and host the font yourself to insure that fonts never change. With remote Google fonts, your font may look slightly different from one day to the next. There are 4 good reasons to host google fonts yourself: They are fun and easy but never fast enough. Why would you want to self-host Google fonts? Are Google fonts are fun, easy and fast enough? Well, not quite.

That is why we created this all inclusive tutorial on how to self-host Google fonts. In response to our article Smart WebFont loading for better performance, we were asked what exact steps are to host Google webfonts locally.

Open sans google font